AvoCado, I would NOT assume that what you see posted on this forum in terms of horror stories is necessarily
typical for parents advocating for their children.
Based on my other work over the years as a parent advocate and support group administrator, what gets POSTED in message board support groups tends to be between the 80th and ~98th percentile in terms of advocacy experiences. Why not the 99th? Well, because in those cases THEIR ATTORNEY has advised them to shut up and behave while the administrative and civil remedies play out, which includes social media silence.
Occasionally, the rare 1st to 5th percentile story shows up, where a parent basically lands in Nirvana. The rest of us warmly offer congratulations while secretly wondering if they are lying...
Most parents don't get all of what they'd like, but mostly, it works tolerably well, and the people they are working with are also mostly tolerably decent and hard-working.
Our own advocacy journey was
not particularly difficult, in spite of having a child that fit-- well,
nowhere, actually. Schools were willing to work with us right up to the very bleeding edge of what seemed POSSIBLE-- and frankly, they'd have done more than
we thought was wise/prudent in terms of acceleration, even. I had ONE set of very tense meetings in my DD's 9 years as a public school student, and that was disability-related, not GT-related.
DD has pretty out there needs as a human being and student. In some ways, because her second 'e' isn't related to learning, it's easier-- and in some ways, harder, because it is very much unrelated, as a learning package.
Still-- they did it. Of the dozens of administrators I encountered in that nine years-- and in the decades of experience prior to them, let me add-- I encountered just TWO
truly Bad, Bad Apples. By that, I mean people who genuinely should NOT have been employed in that capacity, morally, ethically, or otherwise.
One of them was the principal when my DD was a sixth grader-- the one that instructed her teacher to
stop talking to her or me in DECEMBER of that year. Yes, that was pretty bad, admittedly. But everyone did quite the happy dance the next year when he wasn't invited back. Ahem. Life went on.
