If your concern is that placement, I would not excuse this teacher. She is the best person to ask for input as far as what could be done for your child in the general ed setting.
I would respond with, "we would like to consider whether general ed is the least restrictive environment, and this feel that Mrs. X would be a critical member of the team for our meeting."
If you haven't become familiar with the term "least restrictive environment" you'll want to go over to Lisa's blog and search it.
I have excused the gen ed teacher from our speech only IEP meetings. We were wanting speech services that she had nothing to do with, so it was just a legality. No reason to keep her from her classroom for that.
Christy McGuire's post in Excusing members from CCC was marked as the answer