Now, for those of you who don’t know or who don’t have children in school who require Special Education services, what is Inclusion?  In a nutshell, Inclusion is the new movement to take a majority of kids in public schools who have been in Special Education classes [some of them for years now], take them out of the specialized, smaller and separate classes that parents and advocates fought so hard for so  many years to get for these kids, and dump them back into mainstream classes with a support staff member that is supposed to co-teach with the main teacher to help the ’special’ kids.

Why is there a push for Inclusion?  Well, money is the real reason.  It costs less.  If you are to ask a School Administration or Commissioner, though, they will tell you that move is prompted because students need to be with their same age ‘normal’ peers.  They need to see ‘normal’ social interaction, be taught at the same level as all of the other kids, and have the same opportunities as all of the other kids in school.  Separating them hurts them more than it helps them.

But is this really true?

In our experience, no.  Inclusion was the death of us with the public school system.  Granted, we homeschool now and I would not trade that for anything.  It has done wonders for my son and we will never go back to public schools unless we move to a state where you can pick and choose the classes your child takes, homeschool for part of the day, and play public school sports as a part-time homeschooler (because after all, we do pay the same taxes as everyone else to pay for those schools and sports).  But honestly, Special Education services were the only thing that worked for us in public school.  My son has a hard enough time learning in small classes in huge schools.  Do away with that, put him in a middle school class of 30-35 kids and two teachers, and it is a death sentence.  Now he has to deal not only with just trying to learn at the same pace and level as his more advanced peers but also with the commotion and actions and behavior of himself as well all of the kids in the class (many of whom are frustrated and struggling as well) and simultaneously listen to two different teachers.  All in one room.

Disaster.

And doesn’t this move to Inclusion go against everything that caring parents and advocates fought so hard for for so many years with regard to the Americans with Disabilities Act, IDEA and FAPE?

Yes, it does.

So, what to do…what to do?  Honestly, I don’t know.  And I no longer have a horse in that race.  But it concerns me greatly for those that do and for our society in general.

I know in our state the drop-out rate in the 9th grade is over 50% .  And that is pretty standard across the county.  And that was before Inclusion.  My guess is that it will increase now as these kids get more and more frustrated and say to hell with it. I know a Special Education teacher at Rye’s previous school told me that due to Inclusion they are now sending many 8th grade kids this year on to the ninth grade to enter Algebra class at the high school with a current 2nd grade math level.   Because they just cannot reach these kids in a class of 35 kids and 2 teachers.   And they cannot hold them all back.

So, what do they do? I don’t have any answers but I know that at this rate things will get worse before they get better and it breaks my heart that people work so hard in this country to make progress for disabled rights and help our future generations only to have it all undone but some bureaucrats that don’t want to spend money on education or mental health services, all in the name of ‘helping’ our kids.

Yes, by all means, thanks for the ‘help’.

And if you think Special Education services are expensive, wait for the bill on all of these kids as they grow up and become adults with no education, no life skills, and no way to adequately support themselves or their families.

Now that will be expensive.

Ms. Vague and Mr. Grave
Head
A middle school
A ridiculous, utterly preposterous public middle school

So sad, so sad
Are the kids
At the school

They
Are blue

Why, say you?
Are the kids so blue?

Well, it’s true
It’s true
The school does not follow it’s own rules

The kids school all day
Every day
And yet they can barely read

The kids try
And try
Yet most can barely write

Why?
Why?
It’s sad enough to make one cry

Well…
The teachers are bad
The facilities are poor
And Ms. Vague and Mr. Grave
They care no more

They lie
And they cheat
They blame the students
For their own defeat

Their jobs come first
At the sacrifice of
The rest
Yes, they feel that this is for the best

The students get older
But none the wiser

They are moved up
Or shipped out
Knowing little more
Than when they first walked in the door

Why?  Why?
Ms. Vague and Mr. Grave
Why must this be?
Can’t you see what you are doing to our community?

A generation of kids
Lost
Left Behind
Blue and unschooled
Thanks to people like you

____________

[photo source: Michael D Edens Art]

Yes, we are officially homeschooling again.

And now we’ll need a few days to decompress from the ‘heightened state of awareness’ lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to living.

Because when you are a special needs child or the parent of a special needs child and you are dealing with lower functioning public schools [of which there are way too many here in the often frustratingly backward Southern States], you become used to functioning at a very high internal frequency.  A state of heightened awareness and anxiety.  You hope for the best and yet continually find yourself always waiting for the call of doom.  Always waiting to hear what’s wrong with your child or what’s not being done or how your kid is not meeting expectations and what your kid is not doing… and on…and on….and on.  And everything that goes wrong is always your child’s fault.  The school is never, ever to blame.  Or is, God forbid, incompetent.

It’s exhausting.

And ultimately a waste of time, energy, self esteem, and resources.

So, once again, we bailed.  We pulled the plug.  We dared to wish for more and cried ‘Uncle’.  And thanks to Don (we love you Don!) we are lucky to have that option as the cost on all of our souls was becoming just too high.

And now…we are free!

No more worrying about IEPs that aren’t being followed.  No more annoyance over BIPs that aren’t being followed.  No more expecting people and teachers and administrators to do the right thing.  Or to do things they are supposed to do but are never actually going to do, despite being obligated by law.  Because, as many of you know, when push comes to shove the laws only are only in place to protect the schools and their staff and not the actual students.

But alas, no more.

It’s over.

Over, I say.

Now we just need to allow our bodies and minds relax again.   The experiment is over.  Public schools are not for us.  We are gypsies at heart.  Non-conformists, I suppose.   We like to march to our own drum.

Hello, relaxed homeschool life.  We’ve missed you!

Check the video out.  It’s really interesting.

I definitely have one of the kids that is told at school that they will never succeed in life because they can’t get the ‘one right answer’.  And yet, this same child can find so many alternate answers if anyone would just ask about them or be open to them.

Thanks to Christine at www.welcometomybrain.net for posting this video for me to see and pass on.

Please excuse Rye’s absence from school yesterday.  Due to the fact that you insist on mainstreaming bipolar children and refuse to acknowledge children with emotional disabilities as being worthy of any significant amount of additional assistance in the public school setting, Rye is now completely stressed by your school environment and spent the day at home with me fighting off stress-induced psychosis.   Now, I know to you hallucinating and thought process challenges are no big deal and can just be overcome simply by throwing a few psychotropic medications at the child or deep breathing.  However, we have not found this to be the case.  I guess if Rye were blind, deaf, mute or paralyzed you would see that he does indeed have a disability and needs more assistance than you are willing to provide, as those are the only kids who now qualify for significant support in our school system.   Since this is not our situation, however, I can guarantee you our son will be missing many more days of school to come so perhaps you should just go ahead and sign us up for truancy court for surpassing the legal limit of 10 days of absence.

Thank you and we look forward to explaining our child’s illness and absences to a court judge.  Perhaps he or she will have spent some time in a more forward thinking and humane country, will not reside in the middle ages and will have a grain of sense regarding the impact of mental illness.  If not, I guess we will go to jail for caring about our son and not wanting him to live in Wonderland/Nightmare On Elm Street just to get a “Free Appropriate Public Education” that we pay for with our tax money.

Sincerely,

Meg

The good news is that the home life is good, Rye is doing well at home and has *so far* [I have a feeling this is about to change] what is probably his best school attendance ever.  He has only missed a couple of days so far this year and for him that is monumental.  The bad news is that the stress of school and football is starting to get to him and is tinkering with his peace of mind.  For him it is really hard to go to school, sit all day, do work that is really hard for him, and deal with all of the different kids and teachers and all of their different personalities and demands.  As a result,  he now seems to be having some occasional thought issues  and can get agitated at times (although it passes quickly).  He also today told me that at times he is seeing ghosts and such.  Not good.  So, what to do, what to do.  I guess we will call Doc and see about his meds.  I am leary to just up his meds so he can deal with school but I don’t want to just jump the gun and pull him out of school either as I know he is learning at least some of what he is supposed to be learning and it’s nice for him and I to have some time apart.  Also, its good for him to have some structure to his day and to learn to deal with different personalities, etc.   And I know there are parts of school he enjoys so it’s not a total loss.

Urgghh,  it’s always something.

And as for football, sadly his team seems to be imploding.  I guess quite a few people were turned off by the whole police/coach scene last week (us included).  Rye was completely freaked out by this (even though we weren’t even there to see it) as he has issues with feeling safe anyway and has a real issue with people that have been arrested due to experiences with BigB.  Anyway, as a result of that and some injuries due to sub-par coaching, many people are pulling off the team leaving not much left behind.   I guess we need to figure out what direction we want to go with that.

In other happenings, Rye told me yesterday after a very frustrating day at school that if possible he just wants to get his GED at 16 and go to community college and work outdoors.  He says he can’t see spending 5 more years sitting in classes all day being frustrated.  I guess I see his point.  If school was that hard for me and the stress of it made me see things, I would not want to do it either.  Although he does enjoy learning. I think the public school situation/culture may just be too much for him no matter how many IEP accommodations we have.   And  Special Education has basically been done away with where we are so there aren’t many options in the schools.  And I know there are alternatives to public school so we may need to look in that direction for the next few years.  He says he already knows that at community college you don’t sit in class all day every day and that that is more his style.  Class and then a break.  Class and then a break.  Makes sense.  And he says he never, ever wants to work in a job where he sits at a desk in an office all day.  That made me laugh.  Good for him for already knowing that about himself.

I can really see him in a job where he is outdoors all day.  That is the perfect scenario for him.  He gets great peace from nature and physical outside work.  I guess we’ll have to start looking in that direction.

I noticed today I have not been posting as often as I normally do.

There is a reason for this.  It’s called the painful process of getting back into a routine.

A what??

Yes, a routine.  And if you know me, you know these are not my forte.

Now, although I very much like routines once I am in one (well, alright, I like them sometimes), this year we were so loosey-goosey over the summer that the process of getting into one is difficult.  With the start of school now and Rye having football practice 4 days a week and games on the weekends, homework, etc., this has been a lot to get used to.  For everyone.  Add to that that Rye was grounded all last weekend (yes, the holiday weekend.  yay) for getting in trouble at school last week, this means we were all grounded into a lengthy weekend of heavy duty parenting, supervision, lecturing, consistency, etc.   Which made for a tired and preoccupied me.

Overall, though, things are good.  School started with a rocky beginning but Rye is settling in now and getting good grades.   We had to up Rye’s meds a bit with the start of school.  The anxiety was getting to him and really winding him up and making him a kid we had not seen in a while so we made an adjustment there as well.  It seems to be helping.    Rye also felt the pain of his grounding and says now he has no desire to repeat the experience.  Battle won.

Don is doing well in his job and is enjoying it.

As for me, well…

I’m here.

Note how neat and clean this boy will look.  Groomed, if you will.

The other look, on the flip side, is the more trendy look of the kind of longish but-not-too-long kind of look.  Kind of like you are growing out your hair but don’t want it really grown out.  Or even styled really.  Kind of like a mop, sitting on the top of one’s head.  That maybe a bird could make a nest in.  Or perhaps a small family of weasels could bed down in.  And maybe the weasels are actually in there and we just don’t know it yet.  This is how unkempt some of them look.  Think Peter Brady on the Brady Bunch.  Yes, that’s right. That look is back in.

Well, my son, being the team player he is, had to grow his hair out to get the raggedly mop-like look so he could be cool.  For the girls, you know.  And the boys too, actually.  It’s very important in middle school to impress one’s friends.  And, by God, he wanted to look hip.  And to be able to do that ‘hair shake’ of flipping one’s hair back in a manner to make one ultra cool.  You know, the kind of ‘come hither’ move for boys.  So, we let him grow his hair out.  Into a mop.

Now, the thing is though, with Rye’s hair…it is blond and very thick.  And curly when it gets longer.  And did I say thick?  And so as he’s grown it out those curls have turned thick and uniform.  In fact, they now look like pin curls.  Yes, pin curls.  Every morning he wakes up and looks like he set his hair in these the night before.

As he has perfectly styled curls.    And so, as it turns out, his hair now looks pretty much just like this.

No kidding.   In fact, it looks nearly exactly like that.

Now, I’m not sure if that’s what he had in mind or not when he started growing it out but that is where we are.  And last week we went and got his passport application put in and the picture on there looked almost exactly like this, minus the girl face.  So now we will have a permanent reminder of the middle school hair days.

Oh yes, it’s a coiffure to remember.

It’s interesting, though.  He is very much a behavior based therapist.  In other words,  he minimizes the effect of medicines as he believes they don’t control you.  You control yourself, regardless of medication.  Now, as much as I would like to believe this is wholly and completely true, I know it’s not.  We have learned the hard way that it’s not.   And I’m not sure the therapist completely believes it either as I know he know a great deal about bipolar disorder.  Rye is actaully able to make much better decisions and control himself better now with the medication.  Even he says he can feel it and can feel that he has better control of himself  and we can very, very much see it.  So while I think it’s a good idea for Rye to know that he controls himself and that this premise is what makes the actual behavior therapy work, the medication is what makes the therapy doable and we all know that.  Even Rye.

Anyway, so what have we learned so far?

Well, one of the best things from the first session was Practice Makes Perfect.   As he explained it, if Rye starts making good decisions now and practices working on making good decisions as he grows until he is 18 by the time he is an adult  he will be very good at making good decisions.  Making good decisions will be what he does well at the time of adulthood.  Conversely, if he starts now at 12 years old making bad decisions and practices making bad decisions over and over again from now until he is 18 years old, and surrounds himself with others that make bad decisions so the behavior becomes normalized, by the time he is an adult he will be an expert at making bad decisions.  And this will set him up for a very difficult adult life because the one thing he will be an expert at by the time he is 18 is making bad decisions.

I love this concept as it really is so true but I had never really thought of it in that way.

In the second session, today, he worked on reinforcing the concept of making good choices.  We also implemented a system of earning rewards and privileges (verses losing privileges or punishment which is where we were before).    We examined Rye’s behavior over the past week and looked at what he could have done differently and what Don and I as parents could have done differently (because let’s face it, we are learning here too).  We also talked about the fact that if the public school Rye goes to continues to be a total disaster in the fall (he wants to go back to school with his friends) then we should look at private school options.   In fact, he suggested a school that he said is great and so we are going to look at it in a few weeks.  We talked about football and sports, as Rye is really excited about that, and making good goals for yourself.  Keeping commitments.  Showing good character.   These are all things that Don and I talk about with Rye as well but it’s amazing how having an independent third party reinforcing the child and holding them responsible can have such an impact.

And the best thing about the therapist, the piece I just love and that makes Rye want to go and also leave the sessions feeling all warm and cozy, is that although the therapist is pretty hard on behavior and complying to rules and holding Rye accountable for what he does and says, he is also extremely good at positive visualization and enabling Rye to see what a great person he is now and can be in the future, what goals he can accomplish, what heights he can reach and how successful and wonderful he will be in the future as an adult.  It is really great.   He has Rye envision himself relaxing and following the rules and accomplishing whatever goals he wants for himself and having a very successful life.

I love it.

Accountability, following rules, responsibility, caring, empathy, hard work, respect for others, respect for one’s self, and good character, all coming together to create subsequent limitless success in life.

The possibilities in life are limitless if you do the right thing.

When underwater, the world above is muffled.  The sounds are hardly detectable.  The sight is blurred.  And the weight of the water pushes on the body like a gentle, loving embrace.

Rye is out of school now until the school can come with a better plan for him.  Being a victim to physical assault and gross disregard for and refusal to follow IEP plans are issues that one must not ignore.  And as he wound up and up and up with the situation at hand, I finally decided he had had enough.   I placed the burden on the school system after all that they have done to him, and yanked him out.

Yesterday the healing process began.  Tensions were still high as he had his defenses up and was ready to fight the fight.  Today he is realizing he has been rescued.  It is sinking in.  He is exhaling.

And it is unrecognizably serene here at the homestead.

I can’t remember the last time the atmosphere in the house was this relaxed.

It is calm.