What Gets Said. What Gets Noticed.
What Gets Said
“The other kids have rights, too.”
If you’ve worked in special education for very long, you have heard this phrase. It comes up in IEP meetings. It shows up in a parent letter sent to the principal. A board member quotes it after seeing something on Facebook. A teacher says it at the end of a long day.
It is meant as a counterweight. The implication is that students with disabilities have somehow accumulated more rights than their peers, that IDEA tips a scale that ought to sit level, and that anyone advocating for a child with an IEP is advocating against the children without one. It slows the conversation, repositions the advocate as the one overreaching, and shifts the burden back onto the student whose rights are actually at issue.
The premise does not hold up. The other kids do have rights. That is the point. They have the right to attend school, the right to access the curriculum, the right to procedural due process before being removed from either. None of that is in tension with the rights of students with disabilities.
They are the same rights.
The Fourteenth Amendment does not have a separate clause for students who read on grade level. Goss v. Lopez did not carve out an exception for students whose behavior is easy to manage. Every protection IDEA codifies for a student with a disability is a protection that already existed for every other child in the building.
So when someone says the other kids have rights too, the honest answer is yes, and those rights are identical to the ones we are discussing right now. The conversation is not about whether one student has more rights than another. It is about whether the student with a disability will receive the rights that every other student already gets without question.
Look at what the sentence actually does in a manifestation determination. A student with a disability did something that, if a nondisabled peer had done it, might result in a ten-day suspension and a hearing. The team is sorting out whether the behavior was a manifestation of the disability, because if it was, the law requires a different response. Someone says the other kids have rights too. But the nondisabled student in that comparison is also entitled to a hearing. Also entitled to notice. Also entitled to the school considering whether the discipline fits the conduct. The manifestation determination is not an extra process. It is the same process, applied to a population that historically did not receive it.
This is where the upset gets misdirected. The educator, the board member, or the community member is genuinely frustrated, and the frustration has to land somewhere, and the easiest place to put it is the child or the family. The child is “getting away with something.” The family is “playing the system.” The special education team is “tying our hands.” None of that framing accounts for the actual chain of events. The extra procedural step, the manifestation determination, the IEP review, and the functional behavior assessment exist because something the school promised to do did not happen. The procedure is the audit. It is not a favor to the child. It is a check on the institution.
That distinction matters when you are talking to staff and to boards. The system did not invent these procedures because students with disabilities are too fragile to be disciplined. The system was invented because schools repeatedly imposed discipline on students whose plans had not been followed, and then treated the resulting behavior as the student’s failure rather than the school’s. The procedure puts the school’s compliance on the table next to the student’s conduct, and that is uncomfortable for a lot of staff because they are used to only one of those being examined.
What Gets Heard
Be honest about who is in the room when the sentence gets used, and who hears about it afterward. When an educator says it out loud or shares one of those classroom-themed graphics on social media with the same message in a folksy font, parents of students with disabilities are watching. They see it. They screenshot it. They send it to each other. They bring it to the next IEP meeting in a folder.
The reaction is not abstract. It is specific, and it has consequences for your program.
The first reaction is recognition. Parents have heard versions of this sentence before, often from the very people who were supposed to be educating their children. They know what comes next. A denied accommodation. A reduced service minute. A discipline decision that ignores the disability. The sentence is a tell, and the parents who have learned to read it do not need the rest of the meeting to know where it is heading.
The second reaction is grief. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind that accumulates. Parents of students with disabilities spend enormous energy trying to be reasonable, trying to be collaborative, trying not to be the parent staff dread seeing on the calendar. The sentence undoes that work in one line. It tells the parent that the staff member, even one who has been warm and helpful, is operating from a frame in which their child is the problem and the other children are the standard.
The third reaction is documentation. Parents who have been through the system long enough do not react emotionally in the moment. They write it down. They put it in the email thread. They reference it in the formal complaint. The educator who posted the meme or made the comment in the breakroom usually had no idea they were producing evidence, but that is what it becomes.
The fourth reaction, and the one with the longest tail, is loss of trust. A parent who has heard the sentence from a school employee will not unhear it. She will show up to the next meeting with her guard up. She will bring an advocate where she used to come alone. She will pursue an independent evaluation because she no longer trusts the school’s. Every one of those shifts raises the cost and the conflict of running your program, and every one of them is downstream of a framing that your staff did not realize was costing you anything.
What Next
School leaders have to share the reality with their people. Not as a disciplinary matter. As a strategic one. This sentence and the images that carry it are not just rhetorically wrong. They are operationally expensive. They produce parents who file complaints, request mediations, and arrive at meetings already certain the school is not on their child’s side. The most diligent compliance work in the world cannot recover the trust that one meme breaks.
The most useful thing you can do when you hear the sentence in a meeting you are leading is to take it seriously and answer it directly. Yes, the other students have rights. Name them. Enrollment. Instruction. Due process. Then point out that the protections under discussion are not above those rights. They are those rights, written down, because writing them down was the only way to keep them from being taken.
You will say it more than once. To people who hear it and adjust, to people who hear it and argue, and to people who hear it and forget by the next meeting. That is fine. Changing institutional framing is repetitive work by design, because the framing you are replacing is also repeated, in breakrooms and boardrooms and legislative hearings, by people who believe they are defending fairness when they are defending injustice.
The other kids have rights. The kids with disabilities have those same rights. The only difference is who has had to fight to keep them.