2:00-3:00 PM Eastern, Thursday, May 7, 2026

Disability-Centered and Disability-Affirming IEP Meetings: Parental and Student Self-Advocate Roles

Dr. Ramona Schwartz

In this session, the presenters share their experience as a student and parent in IEP meetings to promote disability-centered and disability-affirming goal-setting and IEP processes. By looking at how both the student and the parent review drafts of IEP documents and suggest and change goals based on a student's needs. This experience allows for building teachers' and team's knowledge of how to create goals that reaffirm a student's individual disability experience and to reinforce how crucial Universal Design for Learning is supporting equity within the curriculum and the school environment.

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Identify gaps in IEP goals and processes that promote ableism
• Identify barriers to equity and inclusion based on IEP process and goals
• Learn strategies to center and to affirm disability in writing goals and in creating a more disability-centered IEP meeting
• Craft goals and descriptors that value the student and their learning rather than conforming to a medical-model influenced set of IEP goals and benchmarks

Dr. Ramona Schwartz-Johnston is a parent, advocate, ally, and Disability Studies teacher and researcher. She has worked in urban school districts as a teacher, school-based literacy coach, and a district-level literacy coordinator. As an adjunct faculty member, she focuses on AT, AAC, and language acquisition for Master's level Special Education courses. As a parent, she lives in the world of neurodivergence and multiple disability identities with her children. Her research focuses on the ways that ableism, technoableism, and ableism in communication affect access, perceptions of disability, presumptive competence, and what it means to be in conversation with children and young adolescents who do not speak and use AAC.