How Do You Handle School Gaslighting?

[Lisa Lightner]

• Schools love to say, “That never happened,” or “We didn’t say that,” or “We’ve never done that before.”
• What’s the worst case of gaslighting you’ve experienced?
• How did you document and push back?

[JSD24]

With my son, he wouldn't do the book reports that were assigned throughout middle school.  The special ed supervisor kept saying 'it's will not skill'.  (She was the LEA at his IEP meetings.)  I had no proof to refute this.  In HS (while COVID was going on), I finally wrote to his IEP team after they did his triennial eval (RR due to COVID) that I felt it doesn't match what we are seeing.  I asked for a neuropsych eval - I wanted an IEE but they offered to do one with a neuropsych who was on contract with our IU and I agreed to it.  The result was that he has dysgraphia - something that I had suspected in preschool and the school had looked at more than once when he was in elementary school and had said he didn't have.

He was in 11th grade and was finally getting the accommodations he should have had 12 years ago when he started kindergarten and his teacher had asked about an eval for OT.  The school couldn't do one then because he had been evaluated for OT when he was in preschool and a year hadn't passed so the eval wouldn't have provided valid results.  Part of the gaslighting was that OTs are credentialed to evaluate dysgraphia.  I don't believe that's true even though that's who did the evals in elementary where they said he didn't have dysgraphia.

The interactions with this school have been very frustrating with getting the right support for my children.  My daughter was evaluated for autism in 6th grade.  After an incident in 8th grade, I was asked to give my permission for a psychiatric evaluation.  The conclusion of that eval was that she has Aspergers (later changed to autism level 1) and needed an IEP with the autism box checked.  She had these same issues when she started kindergarten but I wasn't aware of how IEPs and special ed worked.  This is the reason why I advocate.  I don't want to see other families have to deal with the same things my family have had to deal with.