The Experience Miracles Podcast

IEP Advocacy: How to Fight for Your Child’s Needs

Nov 26, 2024

IEP Advocacy for Special Needs Children

Episode 55, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: November 26, 2024 | Duration: ~48 min

Guest: Catherine Witcher, M.Ed., Special Education Advocate, Creator of the Master IEP Coach Program & Host of the Special Education Inner Circle Podcast

Key Takeaways

  • Under federal law, every child’s IEP (Individualized Education Plan) must prepare them for further education, employment, and independent living, but most IEPs miss this standard entirely, focusing instead on behavioral conformity rather than the child’s unique strengths and future needs.
  • Inclusion is an experience, not a place: a child with special needs is truly included when they are accepted and supported throughout their entire school day, not simply placed in a general education classroom.
  • IEP advocacy is a learnable skill, parents can go from feeling overwhelmed or confrontational in meetings to becoming collaborative advocates who secure the right goals, accommodations, and supports in writing.
  • Children stuck in Sympathetic Dominance (the neurological fight-or-flight state) cannot learn effectively regardless of how well-written their IEP is; Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care addresses this root cause and measurably improves how special needs children respond to their school day and therapies.
  • Special needs families carry profound disconnection, isolation, and unacknowledged grief, building real community around these families is as important as any clinical or educational intervention.

What Is IEP Advocacy and Why Does It Matter for Special Needs Families?

IEP (Individualized Education Plan) advocacy is the practice of ensuring a special needs child’s legally mandated education plan actually prepares them for life, not just manages their behavior in a classroom. Under federal law, every child’s IEP must prepare them for further education, employment, and independent living. According to Catherine Witcher, a special education advocate with over 25 years of experience, most IEPs fail this standard because schools focus on making children fit a behavioral norm rather than honoring who the child actually is.

Catherine Witcher, creator of the Master IEP Coach program, teaches parents and educators to filter every goal and accommodation through a single question: “Will this genuinely help my child in further education, employment, and independent living?” When parents learn this framework, they can walk into IEP meetings equipped to advocate for goals that matter, and push back on goals that don’t. The skill is teachable, and with the right words and strategies, even parents who feel intimidated or adversarial in meetings can become effective collaborative advocates.

The stakes are especially high for children navigating nervous system dysregulation. Dr. Tony Ebel explains that children stuck in Sympathetic Dominance, the neurological fight-or-flight state often driven by The Perfect Storm of birth trauma and early stress, cannot absorb learning, no matter how well-designed their education plan is. Addressing the neurological root cause through Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care creates the foundation that makes IEP goals achievable. Both the educational and the neurological path work best when pursued together.

Catherine’s Background and Path to Chiropractic [00:01 – 00:04]

Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: Catherine Witcher has her master’s degree in education and is a champion for families navigating the world of special education. Inspired by her brother with Down syndrome, she spent 25+ years revolutionizing how families and schools collaborate. She created the Master IEP Coach mentorship program and hosts the Special Education Inner Circle podcast.

Catherine, I want to start with your chiropractic story, because it sets the stage for everything you do now.

Catherine Witcher: I came to chiropractic at a mom’s day out resource fair. I was a new mom to my second child and wasn’t feeling my best. A chiropractor said they could help, so I tried it. I got under care myself, but I wouldn’t let my kids get adjusted. I was skeptical.

We ended up moving and found another chiropractor who was very well known in the chiropractic world. And the day I was finally going to take my daughters for their first adjustments is the day everything changed.

A Daughter’s Seizure Crisis, Life Support, and the Turning Point [00:04 – 00:09]

Catherine Witcher: The day I was going to take my daughters to get adjusted for the first time, after all the preliminary checking, my youngest daughter dropped into a status seizure and seized for over five hours. She ended up in a medically induced coma.

They said she had enough drugs in her body to kill a 300-pound man, but that was the only way to stop the seizures. She was on life support for several days. The doctors predicted, in their words, that she would be a vegetable, and they told me to say goodbye to my daughter.

I refused. That mother’s instinct told me no.

She came off life support but was still having significant, life-threatening seizures with code blues happening often. We lived in the hospital for 30 days. When we finally got out, the answer was: “She has epilepsy. We have no idea why. Here’s your bag of emergency medicine, here’s how to use it, good luck.” And they sent us out the door.

I had called the chiropractor from the emergency room to cancel. He got on the phone and said, “We’re praying for you. When you get out of this hospital, you will come see me.”

“She had enough drugs in her body to kill a 300-pound man, but that was the only way to stop the seizures. They told me to say goodbye to my daughter. I refused.”, Catherine Witcher

Catherine Witcher: When I saw him, he said we were going all in. He walked me through removing neurotoxins, changing everything that touched her skin, diet changes, supplements, adjustments, addressing heavy metals. I stopped taking my daughter to the ER when she had seizures, because they didn’t help. He let me bring her to his house where he would monitor her.

After an adjustment, if I had taken her to the ER, they would have said nothing was wrong. Her nervous system was that dysregulated. He taught me about the immune system and how many of her issues were immune system reactions.

That doctor was Dr. Chuck Majors, a world changer.

Recovery, Healing, and the Commitment to Chiropractic Care [00:09 – 00:15]

Catherine Witcher: She had seizures from age 3 to 6. Her last seizure was March 17th, 2009, because when you’re a mom, you know the date.

We did need medicine initially to stabilize, and I’m thankful for that. But she has been off all prescriptions since 2010. She’s now turning 21 and is a fully functioning young adult. And to this day, completely on her own, she does not miss a week of her adjustments. She is in control of her own health.

Dr. Tony Ebel: From age 3 to 6, and then from 6 to 21, there’s plenty of life in between. Stressors, teenagers, college. Plenty that could have pulled her back into the storm. You knew the whole time that to keep her healthy, you had to keep moving forward.

When you were going to move to a different suburb, your decision-making process included continuing with chiropractic care.

Catherine Witcher: Let me give all parents permission to be as bold as they want with every PX Doc they meet. I wasn’t going to move without a chiropractor. I knew special needs families in the area and they mentioned a chiropractor speaking at an event. I went to interview him, to see if he was good enough for my family.

I watched The Perfect Storm and thought he probably got it. But I still wasn’t completely convinced. So I scheduled a consultation. During the scans, I kept asking detailed questions: how are you going to do this, how will we look at that? I explained that my daughter gets stuck, won’t get a fever when sick, then her immune system crashes and she ends up with a seizure. I knew all the triggers, I needed to see if they had answers.

Parents need to hear that it’s okay to describe exactly who your child is and how they experience the world. When you get the right team to rally around you, it makes all the difference.

“IEP advocacy, like chiropractic care, is about finding the right team that will honor the uniqueness of your child and what they need.”, Catherine Witcher

How PX Docs Trains Chiropractors to Listen First [00:15 – 00:20]

Dr. Tony Ebel: I want to continue encouraging parents to advocate boldly. I’m heading to the 50th anniversary of Life University to teach our postgraduate certification clinical course, the in-depth training that doctors on our directory have completed.

When I submitted the curriculum, I included a full module: 25 hours of training on communication. The university rejected that portion. They said it wasn’t appropriate for a clinical certification.

I told them: then you can’t have my program. Teaching doctors how to scan, adjust, and build care plans is useless if I can’t teach them to step into this space and fiercely advocate. So we kept the module.

The communication framework starts with listening first. Don’t regurgitate subluxation and chiropractic philosophy right away, just listen, because nobody has listened to these moms. We train doctors on what we call CSI: Chiropractic Science Investigation. We’re going to find the root cause that these moms already know, but nobody has ever shined a light on it and given them clarity.

Catherine Witcher: I’ve been doing special education advocacy for 30 years and that is the exact same framework. When families walk into an IEP meeting, most of the time nobody has actually listened to them either. The moment someone listens deeply, and then gives them words for what they already know, everything changes.

Dr. Tony Ebel: Worth noting for chiropractors: C2 subluxations cause more seizures than any other subluxation pattern. That’s the kind of root-cause connection that matters, but it’s only useful if the doctor knows how to communicate it in a way the family can hear and act on.

From Classroom Teacher to Special Education Advocate [00:20 – 00:28]

Catherine Witcher: My brother is now 47 with Down syndrome, part of the first generation of fully educated adults with disabilities. The law wasn’t enacted until 1975. He was born in 1977.

I watched my mom, part of the first generation of advocates, navigate the school system. My 10-year-old brain couldn’t understand why it was so hard. So I decided I’d become a teacher and solve all the problems in special education.

I went all in, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, five teaching certificates. I walked into my first classroom with nothing but a stack of IEPs.

I started teaching by day and coaching parents by night. I was telling them what to say to my boss, ghostwriting their letters. When my boss would mention these family concerns, I’d play innocent, while making sure my students got what they needed: curriculum, working air conditioning, health accommodations. I only stayed a teacher for about three years before moving into consulting and advocacy.

After one IEP meeting, an administrator chased me to the parking lot. She asked who I worked for. When I said myself, she asked me to train her staff on how to write IEPs, because she had never seen anything like it.

Dr. Tony Ebel: So how did Master IEP Coach become what it is?

Catherine Witcher: People said they wanted to help families the way I did. Teachers wanted to learn for their students. Parents wanted to help their own children and others. So I took 20 years of experience and made it accessible online for parents, teachers, administrators, and therapists.

It’s a skill you can learn. Whether you’re scared or overcompensating with a bulldog approach, there’s a collaborative way to do this. You just need the right words and strategies.

What an IEP Should Actually Do: The Three Pillars of Special Education Law [00:28 – 00:35]

Catherine Witcher: The core focus of any IEP should be preparing every child for further education, employment, and independent living. That’s actually in the law. Your child’s IEP is legally required to prepare them for those three things.

I tell all parents: filter your child’s IEP through this lens. Ask about every single goal: “Will this really benefit them in further education, employment, and independent living?”

Because so often, schools are focused on making kids fit into a box. Making kids behave “normally.” They’re focused on things that don’t honor the uniqueness of who the child is and what they need. I was focused on finding a team that could honor the uniqueness of my daughter’s needs. Education should be no different.

Dr. Tony Ebel: The system is filled with good people and good intentions, but moves everything in the opposite direction of those intentions. That describes education perfectly. Great people, but the system is an overpowering roadblock. Parents have to be tough, resilient, prepared advocates.

“Filter every IEP goal through this question: will this actually benefit my child in further education, employment, and independent living? That’s the law, and most IEPs don’t meet it.”, Catherine Witcher

Catherine Witcher: An ideal outcome looks like this: a parent who was scared or overwhelmed coming in and saying, “My child has no friends, they’re behind in reading, and they’re always leaving their coat on the bus.” Everything feels like a hot mess.

And their biggest fear underneath all of it is: what happens when I’m not there? What happens when I’m not there to pick up after them, to translate the world for them, to be their advocate?

That fear and that goal are the same thing in different wrapping paper. When we make that the GPS coordinate, and build the IEP around it, everything else starts to align.

Inclusion as an Experience: Getting Special Needs Kids Into Growth Mode at School [00:35 – 00:41]

Catherine Witcher: A lot of parents think inclusion means putting their child into a general education classroom. That’s not what I mean.

When I say inclusion is an experience, not a place, I mean your child is accepted for who they are and supported for who they are from the time they step onto campus to the time they step off. That means lining up the right teachers with the right IEP goals, the right therapies, and being smart about what the school can provide that you can’t provide at home.

Dr. Bruce Lipton says it perfectly: you cannot be in growth and protection mode at the same time. If your child is in protection mode throughout their school day, unsupported, without friends, not being understood, your child will not be learning at school. We have to build an environment that gets them into growth.

And that’s not lofty. Once we know what we’re looking for, we break down your child’s day by the minute: How do we transition from reading to recess? How do we come back from lunch? We tear apart the day step by step to get them in the best place for learning to occur.

Dr. Tony Ebel: The cheat code underneath all of this, and you can speak to it better than anyone, is that when kids are getting Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, the transitions, the goals, the plans are pursued with greater efficiency and completeness. Because underneath it all is the neurological storm. A child stuck in Sympathetic Dominance, nervous system locked in fight-or-flight, that shows up class to class, kid to kid, social interaction to social interaction.

When we insert Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care to get them out of that storm, it opens up the possibilities of everything from the IEP onward. It’s the same conversation with PT, OT, and speech: let us handle the foundation, getting the nervous system out of fight-or-flight, and then everything else can build on top of it.

Catherine Witcher: Sometimes the school team gets frustrated because a child is so on one day and then seems like a hot mess the next. They say, “I don’t know why your child isn’t consistent.” And I tell parents: this is part of the healing journey. It is not linear. We will see some regression. But when we come back from those rough patches, your child leaps forward.

Sometimes we’re halfway through the school year and the school says, “We thought we’d be working on this goal for a year, but they already met it.”

What Special Needs Families Need Most: Connection, Community, and Permission to Ask for Help [00:41 – 00:47]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Real talk, beyond what you find on the internet, beyond the standard medical and educational systems, what do special needs families actually need most?

Catherine Witcher: They need people.

We are in the most disconnected communities I have ever seen. Growing up as a special needs sibling, we had connection at a whole different level, without the internet. Today, we have the advantage of connecting across the country and finding like-minded families, but it can also be information overload.

When we can get around a special needs family and help them simplify, help them understand what is possible, it makes their life better. The amount of chaos, overload, disconnection, isolation, confusion, and self-blame happening inside the walls of their home? They won’t admit it to their doctor. They won’t even admit it to friends going through the same things.

“What do special needs families need most? They need people. Connection, support, understanding, and help, even when they don’t want it.”, Catherine Witcher

I’ll call it out: you are grieving. Even if your child is 12 years old and the diagnosis came at age three, you are still grieving. And that’s not a pity party. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to bring that wall down and tell someone what you need.

When you earn a family’s trust, they will be with your practice forever, and you will change their life. Dr. Chuck Majors changed my life. I would not have met Dr. Tony. We would not have done the work we’ve done together for the disability community.

Dr. Tony Ebel: I had a mentor who told me to build a community within our community, with our practice, literally the brick and mortar. Over half our team are special needs parents. We don’t hire from job sites. We hire from within the community so we can continue to support and strengthen it. It’s joyful, and not without struggle. Not without rough days, rough seasons, and loss.

But that conviction to do more empowerment, more advocacy, more community building, more adjusting? That only grows.

Where to Start: Resources and Final Words [00:46 – 00:48]

Dr. Tony Ebel: For parents who are new to the IEP world, or who are newly understanding the role they can play in it, where should they start?

Catherine Witcher: Go to masteriepcoach.com. Take all the free resources available, podcasts, blogs, checklists. Get connected. I’ll show up in your inbox with strategies each week on what you can do.

And remember: whether you’re looking at this from an education standpoint or a medical standpoint, your number one goal is to live your life, whatever that means for your family.

You’ll face roadblocks from people choosing mainstream approaches. But by listening to this, you’re choosing to do things differently. Rise up to that. Rise up to your instincts and to what you want in life.

Maybe right now your focus is your child’s education plan. Or maybe that’s not the priority, maybe you need to focus on the nervous system first and just feel good in life. Don’t forget about yourself. If you do not take care of you, you are doing a disservice to your children. You deserve health, wellness, and life. In the long run, it’s about all of you together living your best life.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does an IEP actually have to include by law?

Under federal special education law, every child’s IEP must prepare them for three things: further education, employment, and independent living. Catherine Witcher recommends parents use this as a filter for every goal in their child’s plan. If an IEP goal doesn’t connect to one of these three outcomes, parents have the right to question it and push for something more meaningful.

Can birth trauma or nervous system issues affect how a child learns at school?

Yes. Dr. Tony Ebel explains that children who experienced birth trauma or prenatal stress often develop Sympathetic Dominance, a state where the nervous system is stuck in fight-or-flight. A child in this state cannot absorb learning effectively, regardless of how well-written their IEP is. Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care addresses this root cause, and many families find that their child’s progress in school accelerates significantly once the nervous system is regulated.

What is “inclusion” in special education, and what should it really look like?

True inclusion, according to Catherine Witcher, is an experience, not a place. It doesn’t simply mean placing a child with an IEP in a general education classroom. Real inclusion means your child is accepted for who they are and supported throughout their entire school day. This requires the right teachers, the right IEP goals, and carefully designed transitions that keep the child in a state where learning can actually happen, what Dr. Bruce Lipton calls “growth mode” rather than “protection mode.”

How do I prepare for an IEP meeting when I feel overwhelmed or outnumbered?

IEP advocacy is a learnable skill, not a personality trait. Catherine Witcher’s Master IEP Coach program trains parents to go into meetings with the right words, the right questions, and a collaborative strategy, whether they tend toward anxiety or toward an adversarial approach. Start at masteriepcoach.com for free resources, checklists, and weekly strategies.

Why does my child seem to have good days and bad days in school, even during chiropractic care?

Healing from nervous system dysregulation is not linear. Catherine Witcher notes that school teams are often confused when a child is “on” one day and struggling the next. This is a normal part of the healing process. Dr. Tony Ebel explains that regressions are often followed by significant leaps forward. Parents can frame this for school teams by explaining that their child is actively healing, and that the inconsistency is a feature of the process, not a reason to abandon the plan.

How do I find a chiropractor trained in neurologically-focused pediatric care near me?

PX Docs maintains a searchable directory of chiropractors trained in Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, the same approach discussed in this episode. Each practitioner in the directory has completed advanced postgraduate clinical training, including Dr. Tony Ebel’s certification curriculum. Find an office at pxdocs.com/directory.

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