I was watching Dr. Phil the other day (not something I normally do) and one of the guests was a 14 year old girl who, well, you know.  She’s a mouthy handful and always has been.  Dr. Phil made a BIG deal about how this 14 year old had been suspended once in kindergarten. 

Once.

I lol’d.

My kid was suspended so many times in kindergarten, after a while I quit keeping track.  Frankly, I didn’t mind when she got suspended because at least it meant the school wouldn’t be calling me with bothersome bullshit for which I (nor they) had any solutions.  Did I excuse my kid’s behavior?  Absolutely not.  Was the school making it worse?  Absolutely yes.  Could I prove it?  No.  Could I reason with my tiny tyrant to behave better?  Also no. 

When Girly came to me, she was only four years old, or as they call say, an “early five”.  Protocol dictated she enter a full day of kindergarten and since CPS had legal control over her, I had no choice but to go along with it.  She was still taking naps in the middle of the day for at least an hour, sometimes two hours.  She was completely unprepared for kindergarten and I knew it.   I did seek out more appropriate programs that I felt might satisfy CPS but Girly was “too old” for any of them.

This was the gateway to the most miserable life experiences I’ve ever had – all perpetrated by a bunch of adults with fully formed brains and a collective plethora of life experiences to draw from to make good decisions.

The results were predictably terrible.  I was SpEd ignorant.  I had never heard of an IEP or 504 or BIP or EI room or CI room or developmental delays.  Nothing.  I knew zero things about that world. 

It started out awful.  Within the first week she slammed some kid’s arm in a door and it went downhill from there.  At one point, she’d literally bit off and swallowed every eraser on every pencil in the classroom.  The tips of felt markers.  Soap.  Chalk.  She attacked other students.  She was stealing, destructive, running off.  At one point, I was picking her up early almost every day.

The school eventually reduced her to half-days, it helped a little.  She repeated kindergarten.  It was somewhat better but not much.  By first grade her rage started turning inward and about a month into that 3rd year, she expressed a desire to be dead.  I didn’t blame her. I wasn’t even in her situation and I wanted to be dead.  She wasn’t learning anything.  She was hard to deal with in the classroom.  She had no friends.  She was being targeted by staff.   Armed with sheer desperation and anger, I started beating on doors (again) until I found people that could help her. 

I HAD tried to get her help early on.  She was “too young” to benefit from therapy.  She was “too young” for medication.  She was “too old” for appropriate programs.  She was “too bad” for this, “too that” for those.  I tried and tried and tried and I was blown off or told, I wasn’t “trying hard enough.”  I wasn’t trying hard enough?  At what? 

When I literally said the words, “AT WHAT?” I received nothing.  Just silence.  From a pediatrician who refused to do anything helpful or otherwise.  No screenings, no meds, no advice.  Nothing.  All he said was, I wasn’t trying hard enough – but didn’t even tell me what I was supposed to be trying to do. 

One hallway of desperation I went down was seeking an attorney to sue the school district.

I found one person, one hit for my county.  I shot her an email.  She responded surprisingly fast.  She was not an attorney, she was an Educational Advocate.   We met and she accepted Girly as a client.  I wrote a check for $325 and she asked me to rescind all the releases the school had and send a form over saying she was the person in handling all this stuff for Girly now.  She told me to fax it, send me a photo of the proof they received it, which I did.

She kind of warned me when the school got the fax, my whole world would change.

I didn’t believe her.  I mean, I had a feeling she would be able to help but I figured there’d be some hard limits.

Five minutes after the fax went through, my phone started ringing.  It was the school.  OOOOOOOOOH all the things they are going to do!  Yay!

Wow. How great is that? They are going to do all the things…. all the things they could have been doing all the fuck along??  All the things they knew about but I didn’t? All the things they didn’t bother to do that in the end, caused damage that still exists 10 years later??

It could have ALL been mitigated.  All of it. 

It was a bittersweet moment I suppose.  Finally, shit started to change but knowing they could have been doing all those things the whole time was like an absolute kick in the face.  The decision (and it absolutely WAS a decision on some level) to not provide my kid services, basically ruined her.  The chance she’d ever turn it around were virtually non-existent.  She’s still significantly behind academically (which I truly believe wouldn’t be the case if they’d just backed off that first year or provided her appropriate services).  Emotionally, she’s made a ton of progress but most of it happened during the Covid lock-down.   Our district managed to snag a wonderful SpEd director so I have a lot of hope for the rest of her school experience but she would be so much further along had all these so-called experts gotten the fuck out of my way and let me make the decisions. 

I inherently knew what she needed.   I bet on some level, even Little Girly knew what she needed.  

So, if you are having trouble with your school… if your gut is nagging at you but teachers and administrators are giving you grief, do NOT delay seeking out an educational advocate.  There are agencies that will provide them for free (something I found out later on).  This can’t wait.  A lot of schools will scapegoat kids like Girly, don’t let them do it to your kid.  Go with your gut because one thing for sure, your gut is a hell of a lot more reliable than a bunch of adults with fully formed brains and a plethora of life experiences to draw from.