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

Over-accommodation happens in schools—and it doesn’t serve kids. When supports are applied indiscriminately or without developmental nuance, we risk reinforcing dependency, anxiety, and chronic underachievement.

And under-accommodation is just as damaging, if not more damaging. Countless children with legitimate, unmet learning needs remain unidentified, unsupported, and misunderstood. They, too, are vulnerable—to anxiety, learned helplessness, depression, and disengagement.

This blog post responds to the overly simplistic narratives I often see on social media surrounding 504s and IEPs. These conversations frequently miss the complexity of what real support looks like.

For me, this topic sits at the intersection of personal experience and professional practice. It’s not just theoretical—it’s lived, observed, and refined through years of work with educators, families, and neurodivergent learners.

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, to struggle 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 work as well as to try to remove or escape stress and emotions. It protects fragility rather than building capacity. It often stems from good intentions—but it can reinforce patterns of disengagement, rumination, and learned helplessness. It conveys, “We need to lower the bar for you, save you, protect you, and keep you away from stress or struggle.”

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 right.

Students who work at a slower pace may require time to take in the information, as well as to process, organize, and express their ideas. They should not be penalized for reading, writing, memorizing facts, or processing material more slowly. The point is to learn and effectively show what we can do, not race.

But extended time is not universally beneficial. For more anxious students who process information at a fast pace, extended time may reinforce rumination and avoidance. In this way, when misapplied, extended time could be a barrier to growth rather than a bridge to access.

Extended time should be tied to specific learning profiles, not solely to emotional discomfort. Otherwise, we risk confusing accommodation with enablement—and confusing enablement with equity. I have seen this kind of signaling a lot in recent years. This sort of signaling, “Make me comfortable or you are discriminating against me.” And this isn’t the point of the American Disabilities Act.

Over-Accommodation Meets Under-Recognition

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

Kids do come into the world with different proclivities, temperaments, and sensory profiles. 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 ways to foster courage, resilience, and overall wellness in these kids. In other words, the adults do not seem to know how to properly accommodate in a way that fosters growth.

What we see is a lot of distressed kids whose needs were not met. And Instead of addressing root causes of kids’ distress, such as unmet learning needs, and rather than fostering courage in kids with anxiety, schools frequently offer accommodations like intentional distractions and calm-down plans. This is where they really fall!

Calm down plans 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 high quality literacy instruction should be the priority. And educators should confidently scaffold, emotionally support, and guide kids through that high quality education.

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.

Overt calm-down plans should not be a substitute for kids’ needs (E.g., connection, skill-building, evidence-based high quality learning, and emotional needs). And truthfully, calm down plans are not a good plan at all.

At Raising Moxie, we advocate for emotionally attuned environments that prevent emotional flooding—not systems that institutionalize escape. ‪We pace exposures (up regulation through physical and psychological challenge) rather than escape (down regulation). ‬

Hiding in Plain Site; 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, for example)—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, they 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 repeatedly neglects learning needs, balks at challenges, and conflates 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 academically. I seemed too bright to have academic struggles. And the adults in middle and high school didn’t inquire if I had non-remediated dyslexia.

Dyslexia is neurological, inherited, and deeply impactful. Those of us with the disorder, no matter how “ bright we are, often manage chronic underperformance given our capabilities.

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 (e.g., Dyslexic, 2E) 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.

While 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.

As I’ve noted, there are profiles directly shaped by school environments—where accommodations may be contraindicated. But it is my experience as (1) a Psychologist, (2) a parent of a child with dyslexia, and (3) Dyslexic adult 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.

And, 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 an individual problem. 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 we stop with the placing bandaids on symptoms and start addressing causes- foundational needs (sleep, exercise, healthy food, nurturing relationships, stress related growth, and educational needs). 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.