About me

I am Selica Granderson, Founder of Roosevelt Academy

I came to this work as a mother first.

My son was born at thirty weeks and spent his first months in a neonatal ICU. By ten months, doctors had identified a language disorder. Autism and chronic asthma followed. He struggled to speak, to eat, to breathe. He fought for all of it, and so did I, and I learned very early that having a child with disabilities means learning to navigate systems that were not designed with your family in mind. The hardest lessons came in school buildings. I sat at conference tables and listened to people describe my son in terms of what he could not do. I asked for speech, occupational, and behavioral therapy and was told he did not qualify. I filed grievances. I learned that a parent who pushes is treated differently than a parent who accepts, and that the difference is not about the child.

So I went and learned the law. Not summaries of it, the actual law. I learned what an evaluation is required to contain and what a district is obligated to provide. I learned the difference between a service written into a document and a promise made in a hallway. And the next time I sat at that table, I came prepared.

I got what my son needed. But I got it because I had time to learn, because I was stubborn in a way that happened to be useful, and because I would not leave. None of that is the same as deserving it. The child down the hall deserved it just as much. That is not a system. That is a lottery.

That is where the rest of this comes from.

I earned the Master IEP Coach credential and have trained more than 120 educators in special education advocacy and the IEP process. I have sat beside families in meetings across Oklahoma and Texas, helping them prepare, ask better questions, and understand what they are entitled to request. I have watched the moment a mother realizes she is allowed to disagree. It never gets old. But advocacy has a ceiling. You can win a meeting and still send a child back into a classroom that was never built for how she learns. Eventually the honest answer is that the room itself has to be different.

In 2023 I founded Roosevelt Academy, a Cognia-accredited school in Oklahoma City serving neurodiverse learners in grades K through 12.

What I want inside that building is simple to say and hard to build. I want a child who has been the problem in every classroom he has ever been in to walk into ours and find out he is not a problem. I want a girl who has spent years being talked about in the third person while sitting right there to be asked directly what she thinks. I want our students to leave knowing their own minds, able to say what they need out loud, to a stranger, without apologizing for it.

Everything we do is built backward from that.

There is a harder chapter in this story, one that came after the fighting and cost my family a great deal. I have written about it in full, in my own words, and you can read it here. I do not lead with it, because it is not the whole of who I am. But I do not hide from it either.

This site is where I write about the work. Some of it is practical, the things I wish someone had handed me before my first meeting. Some of it is about what it costs to raise a child the world keeps underestimating, and what it gives back. I am glad you are here.

Selica Granderson
Founder Roosevelt Academy
Master IEP Coach®