The aim of this article is to understand how families perceive the educational process of students enrolled in specialized institutions and their motivation for seeking them out and staying with them. The methodology is a case study of two specialized institutions in Belo Horizonte, based on an analysis of the Political-Pedagogical Project (PPP) of one of them and six semi-structured interviews with family members of students enrolled in both. The document and the transcript of the interviews, after being categorized, were analyzed using Content Analysis. The results show that among the factors that lead family members to seek out these institutions are exclusion and situations of violence in ordinary schools. The conclusion is that there is an urgent need for ordinary schools to adopt truly inclusive behavior, guaranteeing the right, access, permanence, learning and participation of students who are the target of Special Education and definitively eradicating exclusionary behavior.