There are certain foods I cannot eat. Cheese is one of them. This sounds simple enough.Four words. A perfectly manageable dietary limitation.
I cannot eat cheese.
Surely civilization can handle this.
After all, we have landed people on the moon, developed tiny computers that can recognize our faces, and invented a machine that will vacuum the floor while we’re sitting on the couch eating snacks.
Surely someone can make a sandwich without cheese. And yet, cheese has somehow become less of an ingredient and more of a governing principle.
Cheese is everywhere.
It is melted onto things. Stuffed inside things. Sprinkled over things. Folded into things. Baked beneath things. Baked on top of things. Sometimes it is baked beneath something that is itself covered in cheese.
At some point, I suspect we stopped asking whether a dish needed cheese and simply began assuming that cheese was going to be involved somehow.
Take lasagna. Lasagna without cheese isn’t really lasagna. It’s pasta having an identity crisis. It’s several layers of noodles desperately trying to remember what they were supposed to become.
Pizza presents a similar problem. A cheeseless pizza isn’t pizza. It’s a piece of bread with tomato sauce sitting on top, like it got dressed in the dark and has been too embarrassed to tell anyone.
And then there are enchiladas. Enchiladas are particularly dangerous because they can look completely innocent. You see a beautiful tortilla wrapped around seasoned meat, smothered in a deep red sauce, maybe with roasted peppers and onions, spices blooming through the air, the whole thing steaming gently when it arrives at the table.
You can smell the chile. The cumin. The toasted tortilla. The savory meat. Your stomach begins preparing for the event. And then you notice it.
Cheese.
Not a little cheese. Not an apologetic sprinkle.
A geological deposit. A molten blanket. A dairy landslide stretching across the entire plate.
And this is where people sometimes say: “Oh, just scrape it off.”
Ah. Yes. Of course.
The famous Scrape It Off accommodation. Because apparently cheese is like a hat. You simply remove it and everything underneath remains exactly as it was.
Except cheese melts.
Cheese spreads.
Cheese bonds with things.
Cheese leaves behind evidence.
You can scrape the visible cheese off an enchilada, but the melted dairy residue has already conducted a hostile takeover of the surrounding food.
The tortilla has been touched.
The sauce has been touched.
The meat has been touched.
The cheese has left its fingerprints everywhere.
And that’s when something that sounds ridiculously simple begins to resemble an accommodation.
Which brings me to public schools.
Because accommodations are often discussed as though they are little favors that can be effortlessly bolted onto an otherwise perfectly functioning system.
Just give the student a little extra time.
Just let them sit somewhere quieter.
Just provide the support they need.
Just make the assignment accessible.
Just don’t give them cheese.
The word just is doing an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting in those sentences. Because sometimes the problem isn’t that the accommodation is difficult. The problem is that the system wasn’t designed for it.
Imagine a school cafeteria. The menu is planned. The food is prepared. The trays are assembled. The adults have a hundred things to remember. Teachers are moving students through lunch. Substitutes may not know the child.
Cafeteria workers may not know the child. Someone is rushing. Someone misunderstood. Someone forgot. And somewhere in the middle of all that organized chaos is a kid who is supposed to receive an accommodation.
On paper, everything is fine. The accommodation exists. It has been documented. It has been discussed. It may even have been signed by several people with impressive titles. But the kid is standing there holding a tray with cheese on it.
And suddenly the accommodation isn’t a paragraph in a document anymore.
It’s real.
It’s a hungry child.
It’s lunch.
It’s the smell of hot food.
It’s the embarrassment of having to explain yourself again.
It’s the other kids watching.
It’s wondering whether you’re going to be the difficult kid.
It’s wondering whether you should just eat around it.
It’s wondering whether an adult is going to believe you.
And that is the part that can get lost when accommodations are discussed in abstract terms. An accommodation isn’t actually an accommodation until it survives contact with reality. Until it makes it from the paperwork to the classroom.
From the classroom to the cafeteria.
From the cafeteria to the field trip.
From the regular teacher to the substitute.
From the meeting room to the person actually standing in front of the child.
Because it is remarkably easy to accommodate someone in theory.
The paperwork is cooperative.
The paperwork never forgets.
The paperwork never gets distracted.
The paperwork doesn’t have a hundred hungry children asking questions at the same time.
The paperwork doesn’t accidentally put cheese on the enchilada.
People do.
And people are wonderfully, spectacularly imperfect. Which means accommodations require something more than simply identifying what a student needs. They require a system capable of remembering that need when the student isn’t standing there reminding everyone. That’s especially important because the burden shouldn’t fall entirely on the child.
A seven-year-old shouldn’t have to become the chief executive officer of their own accommodation plan. They shouldn’t have to walk into every situation thinking:
Have they remembered?
Did the teacher tell the cafeteria?
Does the substitute know?
Does the person supervising the field trip know?
Should I say something?
Am I being annoying?
What happens if I don’t?
Because eventually the accommodation becomes another responsibility placed on the person who needed the accommodation in the first place.
And that’s backwards.
If I need you to remove the cheese, telling me that I am responsible for making sure every person in the building knows about the cheese isn’t really an accommodation. It’s a cheese-management job.
And I didn’t apply for the position.
The larger lesson is that accommodations aren’t about giving someone an unfair advantage. They’re about recognizing that the standard way of doing something may contain barriers that aren’t experienced equally by everyone.
Sometimes the barrier is obvious.
Sometimes it isn’t.
Sometimes it looks like a wheelchair ramp.
Sometimes it looks like extra time.
Sometimes it looks like a quiet room.
And sometimes, apparently, it looks like an enchilada sitting beneath six ounces of melted Monterey Jack.
The ridiculousness of the cheese example is precisely why I like it. Because we can all understand the basic principle. If someone cannot eat cheese, don’t give them cheese.
Simple.
Except when the entire system is built around cheese. Then suddenly it isn’t simple at all.
And maybe that’s the point.
When we talk about accommodations in public schools, we should stop asking only whether the accommodation exists. We should ask whether it actually works. Because a cheese-free meal that arrives covered in cheese isn’t a successful accommodation.
A support written into a plan but never provided isn’t a successful accommodation. A child who technically has access to something but has to fight for it every single day doesn’t really have an accommodation.
They have a scavenger hunt.
And nobody should have to spend their childhood hunting for the cheese-free version of an education.
And I know what comes next. I know what some people will say. Maybe I don’t really know what I’m talking about. Maybe I’m oversimplifying something that is far more complicated than I’m making it sound. Maybe someone will say, “I’ve been a teacher for twenty years, and I’ve never encountered this problem with any child.”
Someone else will explain all the policies, procedures, staffing shortages, budget limitations, training requirements, legal considerations, and seventeen other things that make the situation more complicated than simply saying, “Don’t put cheese on the enchilada.”
And they may be right. Maybe I am oversimplifying it. Maybe there are parts of this system I don’t fully understand. Maybe there are teachers reading this who have spent decades bending themselves into human pretzels trying to make sure every child in their classroom gets what they need.
I’m not saying they haven’t. I’m not saying every school fails. I’m not saying every accommodation falls apart somewhere between the paperwork and the real world.
But I have lived this. And I can tell you that, at least from where I’m standing, this is what it feels like.
It feels like knowing that something you need has been identified. Documented. Discussed. Approved. Filed away in the appropriate location. And then wondering whether any of that will matter when the moment actually arrives.
It feels like being told that the accommodation is there, while simultaneously feeling as though you are responsible for making sure everyone remembers it. It feels like constantly deciding whether to speak up. Whether this is the right time. Whether you’re being difficult. Whether you’re asking too much. Whether you should just deal with it this one time. Whether you should scrape the cheese off and move on. And maybe that’s the part people don’t always see.
Because from the outside, an accommodation can look like a line of text.
A box checked on a form.
A meeting that happened.
A plan that was signed.
But from the inside?
From the inside, sometimes it feels like standing in front of a plate of food you cannot eat, wondering how the hell you are going to explain—again—that the cheese was supposed to be the easy part.
And maybe I don’t understand every policy, every procedure, or every challenge faced by the people responsible for making accommodations happen. But I understand what it feels like when the accommodation exists in theory and you’re still standing there, hungry. And I understand that sometimes the people living with the consequences of a system see things from an angle that the people operating the system cannot.
Neither perspective has to cancel the other out. But one of them has to be willing to listen. Because sometimes, when someone tells you the cheese is a problem, the answer isn’t to explain why the kitchen is complicated.
Sometimes the answer is simply:
“You’re right. There shouldn’t have been cheese on this.”
Disclaimer: In all seriousness, there is so much more to this topic than what is laid between the buns here. This was simply an observation I made after the kids at In-N-Out messed up my order and put cheese on my Double-Double—even though I asked for no cheese.
Twice.
And somehow, standing there with a burger I couldn’t eat, I started thinking about accommodations.
Which is probably how some of my best ideas begin: with mild irritation, an empty stomach, and a completely unnecessary amount of time to think about something.
There’s more waiting at https://xinkblotz.com.
Telling stories, sharing thoughts, and drinking coffee. A blend of fiction, reflection, and whatever’s brewing—one post at a time.
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© 2026 Mariano Velez ~ InkBlotz Press
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