First off there was the problem of her grades. Buttercup had been a straight A+ student when we home schooled her before. Now she’s pulling failing grades.
I get notes and suggestions and demands to do more with her at home, but she comes home exhausted every day, and we do school work until supper, and sometimes after, every day. With the amount of extra she supposedly needs, I might as well just home school her, where she can have 1 on 1 teaching time every day, all day.
Second are her food intolerance issues. She has trouble saying no to things she really shouldn’t have, not to mention she has to be excluded from a lot of school craft and science projects because they are food based. Because we don’t have an official doctor’s diagnosis (complicated issue there, I’ll explain some other time) the school officials seem to think I’m over-reacting about the food. (But let me tell you, I don’t think I’m over-reacting when I’m scrubbing vomit off the walls or soothing her when she has a pedi-migraine or body pain after an exposure.)
Cross contamination is a huge issue as well. Since we are intolerant to wheat, there’s the lovely fact that if, say, someone has been using wheat flour in a project, the stuff floats in the air for 48 hours before settling. At every breath she’s ingesting it. The school principal said to me, “everything we do is food related!” and she wasn’t kidding. (No wonder so many of the kids around here are obese.)
Actually, there’s a huge amount of insensitivity toward my Buttercup that I just can’t fathom. Like today, she gets off the bus in tears because her pack was too heavy. She weighs about 50 lbs, has scoliosis (we are waiting til she’s a little older and then she’s scheduled to be put in a back-brace to help straighten her spine) and I took her pack and could tell it was heavy. Out of curiosity I went and put it on the bathroom scale to see it weighed 25 lbs. She had been given her sick brother’s homework to carry home as well.
Not only was this hard for her, but when she got off the bus, the driver yells out the door to me, “She was fine on the bus and now she’s being a big baby?” Buttercup answered back, “I was sitting down! It didn’t hurt when I was sitting down!”
There have been times when she’s been very sick and had to go to the nurse, and the school never called me.
Even if she were making everything up (which I don’t think she is), she is still clearly miserable at school.
Third is the bullying. She’s ok when her big brother is with her, but he’s not with her all the time. She’s tiny compared to the other kids in her class, and well-behaved. She’s a target for meanness.
I honestly haven’t begun to list everything that’s been bad with this school for her. I’m totally confused as to why her experience has been so miserable, and her brother, with many of the same issues, has been thriving. But I want what is best for her academically, emotionally, and physically.
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