People who aren’t in education have no idea how bad things are. Special Ed/IEP students have first call on a district’s resources....Yep. And I'm pretty sure it has to do with litigious parents. I've met a couple. We had an autistic boy that freaked out and got violent, more than once. And he was 14 and getting tall. It was bad. I'm so relieved to be getting out. It's a mad house.
“...litigious parents.”
Most IEP parents in my part of the world don’t know how much legal power they have over the local school. Our school had to pay a dad to bring his kid to school every day because we didn’t have a wheelchair-friendly bus. One of our 14 year olds (IEP) threatened to come to school and shoot the superintendent. He was suspended, but only for a limited time, because he has an IEP.