Lives Can Be Made—or Broken—Based on How We Approach Kids And Their Education

Over-accommodation happens in schools. That doesn’t serve kids. But so does under-accommodation. Countless children with real, unmet learning needs are left unidentified, unsupported, and misunderstood.

What Is Accommodation?

At its core, accommodation is about access. It’s the support that allows a student to demonstrate what they truly know and can do—without being penalized for a disability or difference. It’s not about lowering expectations. It’s about removing barriers.

Under-accommodation is a form of neglect. It denies students the support they need to thrive. It leaves neurodivergent learners, especially those with invisible profiles like dyslexia or dual diagnoses, struggling in silence—misunderstood, mislabeled, and often pathologized.

But when accommodation becomes over-accommodation, it shifts from access to enablement. Instead of helping students engage, it encourages them to avoid. It protects fragility rather than building capacity. Over-accommodation often stems from good intentions—but it can reinforce patterns of disengagement, rumination, and learned helplessness.

Extended Time: A Tool of Access—Not Avoidance

For students with slow processing speed, extended time—and knowing how to use that time—is critical to their success as learners. It’s not a luxury. It’s a civil rights issue. These students need time to think, organize, and express their ideas without being penalized for cognitive pacing.

But extended time is not universally beneficial. For students without slow processing speed, it could inadvertently reinforce rumination and avoidance. When misapplied, extended time becomes a barrier to growth rather than a bridge to access.

This is where nuance matters. Extended time must be tied to specific learning profiles, not generalized emotional discomfort. Otherwise, we risk confusing accommodation with enablement—and confusing enablement with equity.

Over-Accommodation Meets Under-Recognition

Many students are placed on 504 plans specifically for anxiety—anxiety cultivated by the very systems meant to support them. These children aren’t born anxious. They become anxious in environments that ignore relational connection, fail to meet developmental needs, and lack evidence-based programming across subjects. For example, curricula is botched, kids develop illiteracy, and then become anxious.

Even for children predisposed to reticence or born hyper-perceptive to sensations or the emotional tone in the room (often kids with neurodivergence), there are systematic ways to prevent the development of chronic severe stress, emotional flooding, clinical anxiety, and depression. But the adults in kids’ lives—both in and out of school—usually haven’t learned the micro-steps required to foster courage, resilience, and overall wellness. This is what Raising Moxie teaches adults - and we are trying to get this science out to as many adults as possible as fast as possible.

At this stage, though, instead of addressing root causes, such as unmet learning needs, schools frequently offer accommodations like intentional distractions and calm-down plans. These are often applied broadly, without regard for developmental nuance or individual profiles. Let’s be clear: if a child cannot read, then, all of the time, all the service pets, and all the deep breathing exercises in the world won’t be of help! Foundational needs like literacy should be the priority.

Calm Down and Coping Plans: When Avoidance Is Institutionalized

Avoidance, distraction, and calm down plans are often offered as emotional accommodations. But for many students, these strategies are inherently damaging, not just because they aren’t the issue to be solved, but because they exacerbate anxiety. They teach children to exit rather than engage, to suppress rather than process, and to disconnect rather than build resilience. These kinds of accommodations are doing no favors. These plans may be well-intentioned, but they often bypass the work required to foster true emotional capacity and eventual regulation. Instead of helping students build capacity and regulation within that capacity, they reinforce fragility.

At Raising Moxie, we advocate for emotionally attuned environments that prevent emotional flooding—not systems that institutionalize escape. We argue that overt calm-down plans should not be a substitute for connection, skill-building, or evidence-based support. Also, they are not a good plan at all.

Meanwhile, there is a very small subset of families who may pursue IEPs or 504s as a strategic move to gain academic advantages. These cases are rare, but they dominate public discourse, fueling resentment and obscuring the real crisis: systemic failure.

The Invisible Pain of Under-Identified Learners

While some students are over-accommodated, others—often those with language-based learning disabilities and dual diagnoses (e.g., ASD and dyslexia)—are tragically under-identified.

Twice-exceptional (2E) learners often appear to be doing “fine” on the surface. But beneath their masking (essentially finding subtle, covert ways to hide differences and challenges), they are struggling daily. They tend not to perform at their true capacity. Often cannot emotionally resolve the disconnect between their own perceived cognitive ability and their school performance. Just as they think things are going better, many fall into a hole (i.e., grades drop) and struggle to get out. And of course, kids with complex profiles are often boxed into a single category, their full needs overlooked. Chronic underperformance is brutal on students and leaves deep, lifelong wounds, which continue to be opened as society continually neglects learning needs, balks at challenges, and continues to conflate LDs with intellect.

Educators frequently misinterpret these students’ challenges as laziness or perfectionism. Parents advocating for support are dismissed as overbearing. And the students themselves? They internalize the rejection.

For dyslexic students, the pain of underperformance is visceral.

As a dyslexic adult, I can reflect on my own experiences of being seen as lazy and unmotivated. I seemed too bright to have academic struggles. The adults in middle and high school didn’t even ask if I had non-remediated dyslexia. If you read the blog post about my life story, you’ll see the dramatic impact this had on my early years. Dyslexia is neurological, inherited, and deeply impactful. Those of us with the disorder deserve to have our civil rights honored and our struggles not minimized. Academic and related relational injury related to dyslexia is existential. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

A Note on the Recent Discourse

Recently, social media posts have circulated, reportedly School Psychologists suggesting that kids who don’t “need” IEPs or 504s are receiving them. Whether or not these statements were directed at us, these kinds of statements rip open the wounds of those of us adults with dyslexia who have had our needs ignored, dismissed, and misunderstood for our entire lives. It often feels as though we are fighting for accommodations while naysayers are questioning the need.

As I’ve noted, there are profiles directly shaped by school environments—where accommodations may be contraindicated. But when it comes to dyslexia, it is absolutely my experience, as a Psychologist, as a parent of a child with dyslexia, and as someone with dyslexia that people chronically fail to recognize our needs, both in and out of schools, and even in the literacy community itself. Perhaps because dyslexia is invisible and not as easily seen on the surface, people struggle to imagine or understand.

If school psychologists are believing that many students receiving services don’t truly need them, it may be that they are pushing back on the tendency for the systems to over-accommodate emotions. This over-accomodation is damaging to kids with anxiety, actually. But it also may reflect a lack of understanding about profiles like dyslexia and the nuanced needs that come with them. And that misunderstanding is not benign—it’s harmful.

What Needs to Change

This isn’t a problem of individual misbehavior. It’s a systems issue. And it demands systemic solutions:

• True Prevention: Stop creating anxiety through harmful educational practices. Build evidence based schools with robust academic materials and instruction based on science. Create emotionally attuned, relationally grounded environments with high expectations.

• Early and Accurate Identification: Especially for 2E and language-based learners who are often missed.

• Educator Training: Shift from blind assumptions to nuanced understanding of neurodivergence and emotional development.

• Messaging Reform: Reframe public discourse to center systemic accountability—not parental manipulation or student pathology.

Final Thought

The current system is failing both the over-accommodated and the under-supported. It’s time to stop patching over symptoms and start addressing causes. Every child deserves to be seen, understood, and supported—not pathologized for struggling in a broken system.

Let’s build schools where prevention is real and every student is given the chance to thrive.