Unseen, Unheard, Unprotected: How Accommodations Quietly Disappear

Imagine the familiar after-school script. Parent asks, “How was your day?” Child shrugs, “Fine.” “What did you do?” “Nothing.” For many families, this is a harmless routine. But for parents of disabled children, this silence reveals something deeper. Disabled children often don’t have the language, awareness, or context to describe their day, let alone whether they received accommodations. They don’t know what supports they’re entitled to. They don’t know when something was missed. They only know how their body felt in a moment they cannot articulate. And into that silence, families are asked to trust.

They are asked to trust that the accommodations written into the IEP are actually being applied, not just promised. That support exists not only on paper but in practice.

Too often, it doesn’t.

Families are told that their child has supports, options, and a plan. They are shown documents filled with lofty goals, deficit-framed language, and behaviour targets. They’re assured that “the team is on it.” But IEPs are only as strong as the people implementing them, and families rarely get to see whether those commitments hold up beyond the meeting. Parents are rarely invited to look behind the curtain, to ask the uncomfortable questions, or to verify that support is consistently delivered. Instead, they are expected to trust a system that has not earned that trust.

Meanwhile, disabled children move through their day without the accommodations they have a legal right to access. Without opportunities to regulate in ways their body requires. Without accessible communication options. Without adults who notice early signs of overload. Without the attuned, responsive care that should be foundational, not exceptional. And because many cannot articulate what went wrong or when something hurt or who removed them from class or how long they spent isolated in an alternative space, parents may never know. The harm lives quietly between the lines of an IEP that looks promising but rarely translates into lived safety, dignity, and inclusion.

And the system knows this. It benefits from the fact that the children most impacted by unmet accommodations are often the least able to communicate what happened. This is a profound imbalance of power: the people who control access to accommodations also control the narrative given to families. When a child cannot tell their story, the system gets to decide which parts are told at all.

What would happen if we wrote IEPs not just for students but for classrooms? What would shift if we stopped designing IEPs that treat disability as an individual problem and instead created plans that hold the environment, the adults, and the system accountable? What if the focus of support moved from the child to the classroom. Imagine education plans with goals for how the adults will adapt, connect, communicate, and respond, rather than how the child must behave. Plans that name the shared responsibility to build accessible, attuned, predictable environments where disabled children can participate without having to mask, cope, or compensate for barriers they did not create. Accountability should not rest on the child’s ability to fit into a system never designed for them. It belongs with the collective that shapes the conditions of learning.

We don’t talk about that. Schools rarely bring it forward unless something has gone wrong. The hard conversations are almost always reactive, never proactive. Parents are told after the fact that their child “struggled,” that something “happened,” that expectations “could not be met.” But very few parents are ever asked more foundational questions: What does your child need for this environment to work? How do we ensure their accommodations are applied every single day? How do we track it? How do we stay accountable to you?

So families are left to ask the questions the system avoids. What does my child’s day actually look like? What accommodations are they consistently able to access? Are they spending time in any alternative environments? If so, when, for how long, and with whom? Who helps them when they are overwhelmed? Are they alone? Are they understood?

These questions are not accusations. They are acts of protection. They are the only tools families have when communication barriers make their child vulnerable to being unseen, unheard, and unintentionally harmed by systems never designed with them in mind.

Blind trust is a luxury that parents of disabled children cannot afford. Transparency is not optional. Accountability is not optional. Care is not optional. And until schools are willing to pull back the curtain and let families see the reality behind the IEP, disabled students will continue to be caught in a system that performs inclusion beautifully on paper, yet quietly fails the very children it claims to support.