I think that, as others have noted, understanding rarity is the key to accepting how much "different" an educational plan may need to look.
This was shocking/hard to accept for us, even though DD was 12 at the time-- but one local school counselor who had been in the same building for two decades in a district with 30% of the students ID'ed as "gifted" by the state benchmarks-- he'd seen one other student "sort of like that." He has seen half of the students in this district (and there isn't a local private school with better academics-- so he does see the top students)-- and that adds up to about 16,000 kids over that period of time.
The students that he sees are usually those with FSIQ 105 (my state's estimated average) to about 140. That is the center of the local distribution-- and DD is still apparently an outlier in that group-- enough to really be a novelty among educators she has encountered.
That was a real wake-up for us as parents, but it has been useful in that it has given us the courage to ignore what "everyone knows" that one does-- or does not-- do with kids.
