Our advocate helped us see that the best way to respond to a tactic like that was to not show any emotion, and also not to give in, but to just refocus the meeting on the facts you had and why you were there. For instance, when ds was compared to other students, our advocate had us tell the IEP team "we're not here to discuss other students, we're here to discuss ds". When they showed an example like I mentioned here, we would not respond to that example at all but instead reply by restating that ds is known to have "x" disability, it impacts him in "y" way with re to classroom academics, and state the proof we had (neurospcyh eval, examples of classwork, data we'd collected at home etc) that proved it. Usually that was all info they already had and that we'd stated many times previously, but the point was - it served to get past a smoke-screenish type of road block tactic the district was using to discourage us as parents from continuing to request what our ds needed...
ps - my other recommendation as you continue to advocate - put everything in writing (emails are ok for this). If you are told something like "ds can't be in gifted program if he has an IEP", after that conversation is over, write an email, briefly summarize what was said, say that you want to make sure you understood what was said correctly (essentially offer a chance for the person to retract it), send the email to the person who told you that and cc everyone else who was present at the time. We did this with every messy conversation we had with school staff where something that wasn't exactly "right" was said by the school, because we knew the school would not put anything that wasn't legal or could be considered bullying in writing. We would either get no response at all or a retraction stating that we'd misunderstood - while we of course, hadn't misunderstood at all what was clearly said, we then had the legally correct information in writing, from the school.
Excellent, excellent advice! Parents may wish to keep this in their advocacy documentation and re-read frequently... especially before and after meetings.
Here's a link to an old crowd-sourced list of
tips for meeting prep.
