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Mental math-- really works to prevent the waterworks. (Who told me that?? I think this was something I learned from someone here, actually.)

I skimmed the thread so I apologize if I am being redundant. Here are a few things that I have found helpful:
1) after every meeting, I write a confirming email and ask for people's input if I got something wrong. I include who is supposed to do what by what date. If something important didn't get assigned to someone with a deadline, I ask for this as part of the followup.
2) figure out what is crucial and come up with an exit strategy if that crucial thing doesn't happen, i.e. change schools, home school,etc. I find that knowing my options if the worst happens helps me not feel trapped in the situation. With my 2e kid this has helped me a lot.
3) I have had to work on letting go of past wrongs. Ok, maybe the 1st gade teacher did something crappy but we are in X grade now. What do we need to move forward from where we are right now.

On that note, I have something that helped and though it won't be helpful to most, I will mention it. We public cyber schooled for the year. PSs hate that bc they fund it. I know they particularly hate it here bc they have empty seats. We had a wonderful gifted program in the cyber school that allowed ds to accelerate at whatever rate he needed to through the coursework and many options available in HS. Then we told the ps to help us with his LD's or keep paying for it. I have never received such a warm welcome It was our bargaining chip. Not sure what other bargaining chip people can come up with for public school but there are good cyber schools out there for the gifted so that's another option. It also made me more confident bc we had an alternative to the ps. I wasn't just begging.

Brownie

... but be aware that there are some combinations of disability/other needs that make it "totally worth" losing you to a cyberschool (or even homeschool) from the public school's perspective.

All we've ever gotten locally is "Wow, sure glad you aren't OUR problem. Have a nice day."

Though, to be sure, I've used that, too-- "Gee, if you do this ONE day thing for us, we'll be back out of your hair. Just imagine if she was yours FULL-TIME."