How schools plan to fail autistic girls while pretending to support them

In January 2025, my daughter’s school closed her Urgent Intervention Plan with a calm, administrative gesture that belied the violence of what had taken place—not only in the school hallways, but in the documentation itself. It came wrapped in phrases like gradual re-entry, verbal reinforcement, and classroom reintegration, but what it really contained was a careful distortion of reality, designed to shift blame, protect the institution, and deny her the right to be fully understood.

The document catalogues her distress responses in the clinical register of behavioural intervention—yelling, threatening, refusing, failing to complete tasks—as though each one emerged in a vacuum, absent of history, context, or provocation. But this is a child who was harmed. This is a child who endured repeated physical and verbal assaults from a peer the previous year, including boundary breaches, deeply violent and sexualised comments, and prolonged inaction from staff, culminating in her decision to call the police when no adult protected her. And yet nowhere in the UIP plan is that trauma named.

They omitted the harm but preserved her reaction

Her body was touched against her will, over and over again, in the very school that now describes her protective anger as difficulty with perspective-taking. Her voice was dismissed or disbelieved, and now her swearing is described as verbally threatening behaviour. She was denied safety and repeatedly exposed to dysregulating environments, and now her retreat to the hallway is called school avoidance. The story of how she came to feel unsafe in the classroom has been erased from the plan, but the behaviours she uses to survive that erasure have been recorded in detail.

This is the architecture of institutional betrayal—when harm is minimised, when context is ignored, when emotional pain is repackaged as defiance. She is not defiant. She is adapting. She is surviving in a system that continues to mislabel her distress as dysfunction and her resistance as dysfunctionality.

When a child’s trauma is framed as choice

What makes this document so infuriating, so shattering in its quiet betrayal, is the way it assigns responsibility. Every issue described—her reluctance to enter the classroom, her dysregulation when touched, her incomplete work, her refusal of certain offers—is framed as a choice she has made. There is no acknowledgment of what it means to be autistic and ADHD in a system designed to destroy you. No recognition of the chronic sensory and social overwhelm she endured for years before she began to collapse. No compassion for the exhaustion that follows when your nervous system has remained in fight or flight for months on end.

This plan reads as if she woke up one day and decided to opt out of school. As if her growing distrust, her retreat to the hallway, her insistence on boundaries, her quiet refusals, are all symptoms of stubbornness rather than deeply intelligent responses to cumulative harm. It is as though her actions are being assessed in a moral register—compliant or defiant, helpful or oppositional—rather than seen through a lens of disability justice, developmental trauma, and sensory survival.

“Supports” that disguise coercion

Nowhere is the distortion more vivid than in the description of her opportunities. They wrote that she was offered the chance to assist in the kindergarten classroom. We said no to that months ago. We said she should never be used in this way again. We said that her inclusion should not hinge on being helpful, maternal, or sweet. And still, it appears here—an institutional fantasy that frames exploitation as empowerment. They call it leadership. We call it a performance.

The suggestion of a referral to Child and Youth Mental Health is another institutional deflection—a strategic gesture that reframes the consequences of systemic failure as personal pathology, diverting attention away from the school’s direct role in producing the very symptoms they now seek to outsource. The school behaves as if her exhaustion is unrelated to their actions, as if she has not already participated in years of counselling and occupational therapy, as if she is not currently under the care of a paediatrician who has explicitly urged the district to honour its duty to accommodate her fully. And they ignore that we are under no legal or moral obligation to pursue external services in order to receive appropriate support at school. Additional services will not repair the harm they refuse to acknowledge. Their impulse is always the same: displace, delay, deflect. Always assigning blame to the child, always absolving the system. The message is clear: she is still the problem. Even after a formal diagnosis of autism, ADHD, and a specific learning disability. Even after seven months of hallway exile. Even after trauma. If she resists the classroom, the failure is hers alone.

A record built to protect the school, not the child

What they have created is not a support plan. It is a defensive institutional artefact, drafted in preparation for scrutiny. It carefully lists every offer made, every refusal logged, every Tier 1 and Tier 2 support box ticked. It reads as if they are building a case—not to understand her, not to meet her needs, but to establish plausible deniability. We offered. She declined. We suggested. She didn’t follow through. We recorded. She didn’t comply. There is no room in this narrative for what it means to feel betrayed.

They write as if they are scientists, observers, outside the scene. But they are in the scene. They are the scene! The distress they describe is the result of choices they made—not just once, but over and over and over again. To delay accommodations, dismiss her sensory profile, ignore her reports. To prioritise compliance over repair. To forget, again and again, that she is a child who needs support.

I remember the hallway because she never left

Jeannie was not sent to the hallway by staff as an imposed consequence. She placed herself there after months of insufficient support, escalating peer aggression, and physical contact that no one intervened to stop. The child who swore at her and repeatedly touched her without consent remained in the classroom; the adults who were responsible for ensuring safety failed to act. So she acted. She chose, with heartbreaking clarity, to remove herself from the space where her dignity was violated and her voice ignored. And instead of responding to that choice with protection or structural change, the school simply left her there.

They did not develop a trauma-informed re-entry plan. They did not intervene to fix what made the classroom unsafe. They just waited, day after day, for her to decide it was tolerable again. But it wasn’t. Because nothing changed.

They claim she missed “15 days” of school. In reality, she spent seven months in the hallway. That number matters. The hallway is not neutral space. It is institutional purgatory. It is the holding zone for children whose presence makes the classroom uncomfortable but whose absence would be too politically visible. When a child is exiled to a hallway for most of a school year, that is educational abandonment, not a behavioural intervention. And when they call that refusal or avoidance, they are laundering their own cruelty into her record.

The real plan was ours—and they buried it

We never agreed to this ladder. We asked for environmental redesign. We asked for a classroom adapted to her body, her brain, her trauma. We asked for a shift in expectations, a shift in tone, a shift in pedagogy. What we got instead was another behavioural staircase: a sequence of demands she must climb in order to re-enter the very room where she was last hurt. They made up their own story and called it collaboration. Then they closed the file.

How dare they ignore her diagnosis

The institution has the psychoeducational report, the formal G designation (and the Q designation she should have received but was never granted), the diagnostic confirmation of autism, ADHD, and a learning disability in math, the repeated advocacy efforts spanning years, and a paper trail documenting her unmet needs with clarity and precision—and still, they authored a plan that treats her distress as a matter of discretion, her refusal as wilful defiance, and her executive dysfunction as a failure of character rather than a documented disability requiring accommodation.

They are fully aware that Jeannie cannot consistently initiate help-seeking without support, that she needs regular prompting, redirection, and explicit instruction to remain engaged and regulated, and that her difficulties with multistep tasks, working memory, and sustained attention in moments of dysregulation are clearly documented as part of her neurodevelopmental profile—and yet, despite this comprehensive knowledge, when she fails to finish a worksheet, loses track of instructions, or drifts away from an assignment due to executive dysfunction, they reduce the moment to a behavioural concern and treat it as though it were a matter of will, rather than the wholly predictable and preventable outcome of their failure to implement the accommodations explicitly outlined in her report.

• The report says, break tasks into smaller steps. They say, she does not complete her work.
• The report says, support her with visual tools and scaffolds in math. They say, she avoids math tasks.
• The report says, give proactive breaks to help with regulation. They say, she spends time in the hallway.
• The report says, honour her sensory needs, including touch sensitivity. They say, she reacts strongly when touched.

This is no passive oversight—it is an intentional refusal to engage with disability as real, valid, and materially consequential; it is a calculated act of procedural erasure, a sanitised narrative of systemic failure recast as individual inadequacy, a strategic reframing in which unmet access needs are transformed into personal fault and distress becomes, in their eyes, nothing more than a discipline issue.

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Jeannie deserves a plan rooted in reality. A plan that recognises her diagnoses, her history, her dignity. A plan that begins with the truth of what happened and dares to say: We failed her. We can do better.