I want to be careful here, because accommodations matter. They represent decades of advocacy. They’ve changed the educational trajectory of countless students. I don’t want to dismiss them.
But I think we’ve confused a floor with a ceiling. And that confusion is costing students something they can’t get back.
What Accommodations Were Designed to Do
Accommodations were designed to level a playing field — to remove barriers so that a student’s disability doesn’t prevent them from demonstrating what they know. Extra time. A quiet room. Text-to-speech. These are tools for access.
Access is necessary. But access to a system that still wasn’t designed for you is not the same as belonging in a system that was.
Accommodation says: we’ll adjust the existing system enough for you to survive in it. Belonging says: we built this with you in mind from the beginning.
The Student Who Taught Me This
I think about a student I’ll call Marcus — not his real name. Brilliant kid. Severe dyslexia. Had every accommodation in the book by the time he reached middle school. Extended time. Preferential seating. Oral testing. He was technically supported.
He told me once that he felt like a guest in his own school. Like someone had made special arrangements to tolerate his presence rather than actually wanting him there. The accommodations were real. The belonging wasn’t.
That’s the gap I’m talking about.
What Belonging Actually Requires
Belonging in an educational context isn’t a feeling — it’s an architecture. It’s the result of deliberate decisions made at every level of how a school operates: how instruction is designed, how space is organized, how staff are trained, how progress is measured, how the culture talks about difference.
At Innova Preparatory School, we didn’t start by asking “how do we accommodate neurodiverse learners?” We started by asking “what does a school look like when it’s built for these students first?” That’s a completely different design question — and it produces completely different schools.
A Challenge for School Leaders
If you’re leading a school or a district, here’s the question I’d invite you to sit with: Are you building a school where neurodiverse students are accommodated, or where they belong?
The difference will show up in your hiring decisions, your curriculum choices, your professional development calendar, your discipline data, and — most importantly — in the way your students with learning differences talk about your school when no adults are listening.
Accommodations are the floor. Build higher.