Bullies Keep My Kid From School

No one deserves what she’s gone through.

Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

I’ve been having a really hard time lately ever since I found out that my daughter isn’t eligible to go to a local special needs high school unless we are residents of the town which it’s in — of course, we live in the town abutting that one, close but no cigar, as they say.

My daughter has autism and Intellectual Disability, which makes her much less mature than the other kids her age.

She’s thirteen, but she thinks and behaves more like a seven or eight year old, right down to still insisting on carrying around her stuffed animals everywhere and wanting to cuddle with her mom every day.

She’s never had a friend in her life, despite all my attempts to connect her with other kids — she just can’t seem to mesh with those her age, and that is why I am so afraid of putting her in school.

The system is broken.

For my daughter to be evaluated and for those in charge to determine whether she gets to go to a special needs school, she has to go through the public school system and fail first.

A parent, apparently, isn’t capable of knowing their child’s needs and making the decision of what type of school will be best.

Instead, she’ll have to be enrolled into a mainstream school and evaluated before they will determine whether a special needs school is right for her.

And I don’t know if I am willing to put her in public school to find that out.

Bullies keep my kid from going to school.

There are a few reasons I decided a couple of years ago to start homeschooling my daughter, but no reason held more weight than the fact that my daughter was constantly being alienated, and worse, bullied relentlessly by the kids in her class.

Unlike a lot of parents in our situation, and I might be the outlier here, I don’t necessarily believe that inclusion for special needs kids is the best way to go.

Some parents want to do everything they can to make their disabled, square pegged children fit into the round black hole of “everyone must be treated the same” public school.

I am the opposite.

I know my child doesn’t fit in or belong with kids her age.

I see it clearly even if no one else does, but no school is willing to take the word of the parent and do what we think is right for our kids.

We just have to follow along with the system, and the system sucks.

There probably isn’t a school in the country that doesn’t tout their work on stopping bullying, but ask one parent of a special needs child what they think of how schools are doing and you will get a whole different picture of what it is really like for kids who are different.

I can’t put her in school…But I can’t keep homeschooling forever.

I stopped working and moved in with my parents to homeschool and take care of my daughter so that she wouldn’t have to go through all the bullying at school, but I can’t keep doing this forever.

I am trying to look for and apply for jobs that are second or swing shift so that I can be home to teach her during the day, but how will that work out if I ever want to have hope of moving out on my own again?

I’m a single mom…and childcare costs are so high, it might not even make working worth it to pay for a nanny for Elise, because even though she is thirteen, she is nowhere near mature enough to stay home by herself.

Right now, we are stuck.

I am in this place where I have absolutely no idea what I am going to do for my daughter and that scares the crap out of me because there’s nothing more important than getting her life squared away sooner rather than later.

The problem is, there are so few good options for us, I feel like eventually, I will have to pick the lesser of evils… and the problem with that is, I am not sure which evil it will be.

All I ask of you…

Parents reading this, you can help.

Talk to your children.

Remind them that some kids in school are different, but just because they are different doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a friend, or at the very least, basic kindness.

Teach your kids to be kind to the different kids.

The disabled.

The misfits.

The downright weird.

Every child deserves to have a friend in their life, and to not be abused at school.

Will you help me make that kind of world for our kids?