The Last Day Of Public School Therapeutic Classes For DD8

Public School In Winter

Well, here we are. We made it to the end of the public school year (YAY!!!!). 

End-Of-The-Year-Venting:  I know some of you have been following along, and some of you know me personally to know how difficult it was to return from our year abroad and to worry about our children being "lonely" due to the extremely rural area to which we moved. I'm sorry if this recap is a little redundant, but perhaps it can help summarize for those not interested in reading back that far!

I (foolishly, in retrospect) enrolled both kids into school when I didn't immediately find a local homeschool group to connect with. DS10 was bullied (and bored to tears), and so by Thanksgiving we pulled him out - after unsuccessful attempts to coordinate with his teacher to try to solve the problem...Her response was "I really don't see a problem", and therefore she did absolutely nothing to help resolve his issues, and when we brought the principal into the discussion, her passive approach was to suggest we return to homeschooling him as we had been doing before. 

To have a school administrator happy to recommend homeschooling rather than insisting that her staff member get involved and sort out the classroom bullying was incredibly irresponsible. 

There were absolutely NO solutions presented whatsoever, not a single attempt made to rectify it, and the school did not even want to know who the bullying students in question even were.

Wow. Just, Wow.).

DD8, however, we kept in school for her therapies. She was getting something out of the experience, and we created an alternative schedule for her so that she wasn't in school the entire day/every day, so we felt that the compromise would work. The more the year went by, the more frustrating it became to deal with the school - as I've blogged about before, one example is that her classroom teacher laid hands upon her DAILY to try to restrain her from walking too swiftly down the hallway at the end of the day, which finally came to blows when I informed the teacher that I would personally walk down and collect DD8 from her classroom about 10 minutes before the end of the day so that **I** could walk her out of the building w/o restraint and w/o the over-stimulation of a hallway full of other kids trying to escape at the end of the day.

This ruffled feathers, but they agreed (since they themselves couldn't seem to think of a better solution than physically restraining her. Apparently rural living means you don't keep up-to-date with physical touch and restraint restrictions for "regular" and "special ed" students.)

I have wanted to pull her many times over the last few months, but I had made a compromise with my husband to keep trying to make it work for the sake of the few good things she was getting at school.  Well, we've made it to the end of the year, and now we are DONE FOR GOOD. My husband finally realized that the negatives far outweigh the positives for our daughter, and that she gets far better therapy and child interaction OUTSIDE of the public school system. We're now both in agreement that we'll seek therapies privately, and do more community-based activities so that both children can be around other children regularly. Done and done.

I'm not sure who is more excited about the last day of public school: me or our daughter.

Maybe ya'll will have a much better experience dealing with your local public school district for full or part-time classes/therapies for one or more of your children, but experience with several schools now has shown that it is not a good fit for our family whatsoever. 

We are trying to hold onto the positives as we move forward. I think, however, that the **BEST** positive is this: we never need to return to a public school ever again.