Seriously? Now I'm beginning to think the teacher, DS and I are ALL apples/trees. Could we be more literal? I had explained that DS thought his project was complete, but if it wasn't, he would work on it over the weekend.
This is going to be (another) long year. Sigh.
Same experience here. After he got our IEP, the school personnel seemed to lose their ability to think outside the box and instead followed the IEP to the letter even when a strategy wasn't working. I had to call the principal a couple of times to get them to stop doing things that increased DS's anxiety.
One of my biggest issue with staff and teachers (who in general are hard working and underappreciated) is that so many of them don't problem-solve. Instead, they stick to the rules, even arbitrary ones, and punish kids who do not or cannot follow them. This often creates more problems than it solves.
Just a note: once the accommodations are in the IEP/504, teachers and other school staff are legally obligated to make them available/implement them. If they don't, not only does the school have liability, the teachers have personal liability. Some of the teachers who are aware of this fear that not sticking to the letter of the IEP will come back to bite them (e.g., if it becomes a he said/she said about whether the accommodations were not implemented by the choice of the student/family, or because the teacher failed to offer them).
An IEP service delivery example of this is counseling services for adolescents. We often write counseling in as a consult service, or a low-frequency check-in, rather than weekly pull-out/direct service, for older adolescents with moderate emotional needs, so that the counselor and student have mutually-agreed on discretion to ease off on sessions depending on need and personal development. This allows for greater autonomy and self-advocacy on the part of the student, and recognizes that some children find it stigmatizing to be pulled out constantly, even when they are doing well. Of course, all students are allowed access to school counselors and psychologists, if they need it, so this doesn't prevent more frequent counseling sessions.
Accommodations can be written to emphasize ensuring access to supports, rather than requiring them. Depending on your relationship with the school, this is sometimes undesirable, as it's harder to measure access than implementation. But that would be one way to reassure teachers that they won't be chastised because the student chooses not to use a particular accommodation.
