be her advocate. I always tried to be nice, but I became pretty pushy in getting my son the services and treatment he needed and deserved.
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I would echo the above. I don't have a special needs child, but I can tell you as a teacher that you need to be an advocate for your child, and that you'll get much better results by being nice about. But don't back down. Don't assume that saying something once is enough. It may be, but make sure that you are getting results.
Teachers have their hands full. They have this many or that many special needs kids in their rooms throughout the day. Their main focus is to address the curriculum, and school in general is designed for the most average child you could imagine, so anyone with special needs is another thing the teacher needs to address. In my experience, we get one little piece of paper for each student with special needs - an individual education plan - and it is about as generic as you can imagine. A lot of times, the speciality is not described, only the accommodations, which seem to be the same for dyslexia as for anger management disorder, for example.
The truth is every child has different needs. Some are more significant than others, and some are more specific, and we do our best to figure out what each child needs, but we don't always get it right. It would be great if a parent would spell it out for us in with purely helpful intent, and even gave us suggestions for how to deal with certain behaviors as they occur.
But be careful, because many teachers feel that parents forget that their child is not the only child in the class and that they are asking for the teacher to focus more than the fair share of her attention on their child. We teachers do like to try to treat all our students equally.