Formal Complaint of Disability Discrimination
This is the introductory letter to a formal disability discrimination complaint I submitted to the school district on behalf of my child in May 2025.
The text appears as originally written. Minor redactions have been made solely to protect privacy.
May 2025
Re: Formal Complaint of Disability Discrimination on Behalf of My Daughter
Dear District Official,
I am writing on behalf of my daughter to file a formal complaint against her elementary school and district for disability discrimination under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
This complaint outlines the specific failures of her school and district to provide legally required disability supports, and documents the resulting educational exclusion and psychological harm my child has endured.
I am intentional in not softening my tone to make this letter more palatable or easier to read. I write it from a place of pain, and I want that pain to be felt. As you read this, I ask that you resist the reflex to protect yourself—through dismissal, denial, or disconnection. I ask that you stay with the discomfort you feel in your body. I promise: it is nothing compared to the literal pain and trauma my beautiful child suffered in her body during 3 years under your care.
It is widely known and easily accessible information—if you look—that high-masking Autistic children perform conformity while silently suffering, often with delayed or hidden signs of distress. These children suppress the very movements, sounds, and behaviors that help regulate their nervous systems in order to meet neurotypical expectations. When schools like hers fail to understand this pattern, children like my daughter are overlooked, invalidated, under-resourced, improperly supported, and deeply harmed.
What follows in these pages is a detailed accounting of the distress my daughter experienced over the course of almost three years at school—distress that was continuous and worsening between winter of her kindergarten year until spring of second grade—and the repeated efforts her father and I made, which ultimately failed, to educate, advocate, and request appropriate and adequate disability supports. This is a case, laid out in full, against a school and school system that refuses to recognize disability needs when they don’t appear in expected or familiar ways. A system that withholds meaningful care and intervention from children even when those children clearly show they are struggling, and that causes egregious harm while denying that harm is happening at all.
What follows in these pages is my righteous anger as a mother exhausted from trying to single-handedly force care for my child into a system that repeatedly minimized, gaslit, and dismissed us—and that never took accountability, never apologized, and never sought to repair what it broke.
What follows is my love for an extraordinary child who deserves safety in a system she has a civil right to access—a system that ultimately denied her that safety and told her, again and again, that there was no reason she shouldn’t feel safe.
What follows is the story of a now eight-year-old, high-masking, Autistic ADHD girl who entered kindergarten excited to start school—who loves her friends and loves learning—and who was traumatized by her school in less than three years.
After two years of tireless labor—working respectfully and openly within the system, believing that care and understanding would eventually lead to meaningful support—I have learned that the school and district do not care about children like my daughter. That lack of care is not imagined or subjective; it is documented in the pages that follow. It is visible in the systemic neglect, ableism, and willful ignorance that allowed harm after harm to be perpetuated against a child no one at her school ever truly took the time to know.
Here is a powerful truth I’ve learned: I cannot make you see the harm you’ve caused if you don’t want to. I cannot force you to face the truth. I tried for two years to help school staff and administration understand how they were actively, even willfully, hurting my child while she was in their care. They consistently acted as though her pain and suffering were invisible—right up until the very end.
I was transparent about how her distress showed up: the lying that led to urgent care visits, a chest X-ray, and prednisone; the daily afterschool meltdowns that sometimes lasted all evening; the violent morning refusals; the self-injury; the suicidal gesture; the weakened immune system; the chronic nausea and fatigue. She showed them, again and again, through frequent nurse visits, school refusal, absences, and tardies—spanning two years. Still, they refused to see it.
And then, at the end of it all, after two years of her pain demanding to be believed, a school staff member said, “If she’s really felt like this in my classroom this whole time, I feel awful.” That IF is the crux of the blindness that denied her care. That if is how her disability was erased. My daughter was never believed. We were never believed.
I cannot force you to see the truth, even when it’s held directly in front of you. But I can make our truth part of a written record that will outlast your denial. I can place our truth in the hands of future leaders who are willing to reflect on the blind spots their ableist privilege affords them—leaders whose care is genuine, whose efforts are grounded in the hard labor of dismantling systems that cause harm.
The school engaged, over the course of three years, in active, repeated, and blatant disability discrimination against my daughter, a student in their care. That discrimination ultimately prevented her from accessing a free and appropriate public education, as is her right under the law.
The kind of hostility my child faced at school—staff and administration—is the kind that’s easy to deny. It wears the mask of politeness. It presents as smiles, niceties, and care, while offering no real care at all. It looks like effort, while no meaningful effort is made. It looks like meeting a child’s needs, while refusing to truly see or understand them. This is the kind of hostility that systems are built to overlook—because if it isn’t happening to you, your privilege means you don’t have to notice.
This is what disability discrimination looks like in real life. It isn’t always obvious or easy to name, but in this case, it is undeniable. It is visible in the patterns, the omissions, the refusals to act. It’s in the way my child’s needs were minimized, her distress dismissed, and her disability denied because it didn’t conform to expectations.
I want to be clear: what my child—and we, as her parents—faced during her three years at school was not passive. It was not a matter of ignorance or insufficient training about Autism. It was active and repeated harm, enacted through the dismissal of pain, minimization of suffering, neglect of care, and refusal to provide adequate disability support. My child did not perform disability in the way the school team expected, so her disability was denied. Even at the very end, we were reassured that she “really is a model student”—a statement that perfectly encapsulates the problem.
We are asking the district to conduct an investigation into the matters outlined in this complaint. We seek full accountability for the disability discrimination my daughter endured over the past three years at school, including a clear plan for how the district intends to make restitution and repair the trust that was broken. We are also requesting a written apology and formal acknowledgment of the harm caused. Additionally, we request that the district provide support in determining an educational path forward that meets my daughter’s needs in a safe and affirming environment. Finally, we ask for a district-wide plan of action to address the implicit ableist bias that allowed this discrimination to continue unchecked, and to ensure no other child experiences what she did.
My daughter is not the only high-masking Autistic child suffering in your schools. Hers is the only story I carry, but we share it on behalf of all of them.
In her own words, from the statement she bravely read during our final meeting at school: “Please do take this seriously.” This is not just a formal complaint. It is her testimony.
Sincerely,
Stacey
aka her Mother