Last year our kids both attended a private Christian school and had been at that school for 5 years straight. We had pulled them out of our local public school because of the new laws in our state requiring public schools to incorporate extremely immoral teaching into their curriculum. In addition, our kids were not allowed to exercise their rights to free speech and were disciplined for sharing their faith with others. Our daughter was un-phased and in full confidence that her parents supported her actions, continued sharing her faith with her friends out of earshot of her teachers. Our son was in 1st grade and he had a teacher whose discipline style included a lot of yelling. Our son has, among other things, a sensory processing disorder and he has extremely negative reactions to angry yelling so he did all he could to avoid being yelled at and he hid his faith. Our most important priority as parents is to nurture and protect spiritual growth in our children. To create an environment where our children are free to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and grow in confidence of their eternal security and in their desire to share that confidence with others. We want our children to be testimonies for Christ - not terrified by the world. This is a long way of saying that we pulled our kids out of the public school system to save them from being lost to the world - especially our son but our daughter was feeling very isolated and couldn't find friends who had common interests. She was feeling like she needed to be in a place where the kids listened to the same music as her and where she could freely express herself as a Christian without being sent to the principal's office every other day.
This is going to be a LONG post - buckle up!
Our children thrived at their new Christian school. It was such a relief to us that their hearts and minds were being protected and loved.
We knew that our son had a sensory processing disorder and we had long suspected there were other issues that he struggled with but we had not been able to find anyone willing to evaluate him and his doctor and all his teachers said he was in the normal range and would outgrow some of his more immature behaviors. But then he entered middle school. He was not keeping up with the maturity of his peers. He lacked focus in class and he fell behind. His teachers met with me and asked me to pursue getting an appointment for a neuro-psychological evaluation so they could determine what he was capable of and how they could help him. I tried to get one scheduled right away but the soonest I could get him in was a year out. Then, they brought in the middle school principal who suggested that we have our son evaluated through the public school system to see if he met special needs requirements. She said they had other students currently at the school who had gone through the same process and it had really helped the teachers understand how best to help them in the classroom. They said that because we are taxpayers, the district was required to provide a swift evaluation at no cost to us and we would be under no obligation to enroll our son in the public school system.
So, we filled out all the paperwork through our local public school district and the process was completed in about 3 months. Our son qualified for special needs but he only needed some minor supports to help him which was encouraging. After the report was shared with the school, we were told they wouldn't be able to provide the level of support our son needed. They didn't agree with the report and instead relied on an evaluation they had conducted after one day of observation on their own, without our knowledge, and essentially said they wouldn't be able to successfully help him get through school to graduation. We were in shock. This had not been something we had anticipated nor had the school given us any indication this might be a possibility. It was mid-May - the end of the school year was a few weeks away and we were callously told our son was no longer welcome at this school. Over the next couple of weeks I advocated strongly for our son to stay at the school. Even his counselor (a lovely and talented Christian counselor) said that moving him to a different school would be very disruptive and could have a negative impact on him.
In the end, we were forced to scramble and get our son enrolled into our local public middle school where he is getting the very minor support he needs and is doing well - at least academically and even socially.
But as I said earlier, the spiritual development of our children is our first priority. At the beginning of the year I started reading a devotional to our kids every morning before school in addition to the 3 devotionals my son likes me to read with him at night (I started reading devotionals to our son after I stopped reading bedtime stories - I did this with our daughter too until she started doing it on her own a couple of years ago). Youth group is an even bigger priority now as well and I am volunteering at our son's school lunch once a week.
Our schedule has been upended. Our son's school is near our home and it starts 5 minutes before our daughter's school starts (she is still at the Christian school and is thriving there) but her school is 15-20 minutes away from our house and our son's school doesn't have any place indoors for him to hang out until 20 minutes before the start of class. So, we all have to get up and leave early. Our daughter gets dropped off a half an hour before her school day starts and then I drive our son back to his school, getting him there about 10 minutes before class time. We have to be this early to allow for potentially bad traffic which has happened a few times and we have barely made it on time to his school but thankfully, we have not been late yet! The afternoon is equally crazy. Our son's school gets out 10 minutes earlier than our daughter's school so I pick him up first, drop him off at home and then go get our daughter- she gets picked up about 20 minutes after school gets out. So our daughter spends almost an additional hour at school because our son has to go to a different school.
For more background information on the point of this post, our son has since had his neuropsychological exam and the results and official diagnoses and recommendations are in! Finally! He has moderate ADHD but it was determined that he can, in fact, focus even on things that don't interest him for short periods of time and even for longer periods if properly motivated (motivational recommendations were included in the report and they are simple). He is very mildly affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder mainly in the areas of social/emotional development (there's a maturity delay), self advocacy and executive function and suggestions for helping him overcome his deficits were also included and, again, simple to employ. He also has an Anxiety Disorder that makes him more anxious than his peers and his counselor is working with him on techniques he can use to calm his anxiety. Finally, the report showed that he is exceedingly smart- the IQ portion of his tests reveal that he is in the 70th to 85th percentile with regard to intellectual and cognitive capabilities in almost every IQ category and there wasn't a single area he was below average - his problem solving capabilities were in the 99th percentile. So, while our son has some challenges, he is more than capable of finding ways to overcome those challenges with support. And the biggest thing he has going for him is his strong faith and high sense of self-esteem. His counselor is impressed by his scriptural knowledge and by how kind and polite he is. God is protecting him and our son is secure in that knowledge.
Now, back to 1 Corinthians 13 which was in my reading this morning. The team of teachers and the middle school principal gave up on our son. They didn't love him enough to try any minor alternative methods of teaching to help him. They let him flounder his last quarter of 6th grade because they had already decided he wasn't going to be able to continue at the school. We could have forced the issue. They said they were willing to try if we invested in a para-educator to sit with him in half of his classes and paid an extra fee to replace one of his electives with a student services class that was designed to assist him with executive function challenges and help him get other classwork done in a smaller class setting with more one-on-one support. But the cost would have more than doubled the cost of tuition and the school was unwilling to allow him to take English or Math at his grade level - he would have been behind and unlikely to catch up to his peers meaning ultimately that he would not earn a diploma. Much prayer went in to making the final decision to withdraw our son from the Christian school. They were not looking at what was in the best interests of our son. It was heartbreaking on a number of levels. But in the end we decided it would not benefit our son to continue his education at a school that not only didn't want him there but were unwilling to truly help him successfully graduate from middle school and ultimately, high school. I think you can probably see my struggle with applying these verses about love to the teachers and administrators at this school and I am especially convicted by verse 5 of 1 Corinthians 13!
Realizing this school was capable of, but unwilling to help our son is hard.
Knowing that our son was going to a public school environment where he was the new kid and there were so many unknowns (and he was anxious about it) was hard.
Understanding that our daughter would still attend the school that rejected her brother was hard (for her too).
Seeing the middle school principal directing traffic as we leave the school in the afternoons is still hard.
Taking our son to watch our daughter sing at school choir concerts where he will see his former classmates and teachers will be hard!
Forgiveness and true, un-resentful love is HARD
I have posted previously about some of the blessings we experienced as our son started at his new school. And while it's hard for me to think positively about the middle school team that treated him and our family so poorly, I have to remember that his elementary school experience at this same school and the teachers there were so loving and encouraging and they were instrumental in providing our son with the environment and Christian education that helped him form his strong faith and confidence in what he believes. And some of those same teachers were the teachers who helped our daughter successfully navigate her first year of middle school and the principal was the same principal who ultimately helped us confront a very serious issue with another student in our daughter's grade.
Maybe you have struggled with loving someone who has hurt you and you can relate to me in this regard. No one at the school has asked for my forgiveness. They truly believe they acted appropriately. And I have to choose to forgive them every time I think about it which is at least twice every day as I drive to and from the school to drop off and pick up our daughter. And every time I interact with the teachers at my son's school or help him get his assignments organized, I am reminded and have to choose forgiveness.
I have an emotional pit in my stomach that hurts so much for our son because I know he really wants to go back to the Christian school environment where he feels safe and he understands that he can't.
But I HAVE to set aside my personal feelings of hurt and not let bitterness settle in. It will eat me from the inside out and I am NOT a person who has historically held grudges. Nor would the Lord approve if I did. As hard as it is not to keep corresponding with the school administrators (suggesting that, for the sake of their Christian testimony, they not treat other families the way they treated ours), I have to let my own desires to effect positive change in the school go and let God work in the hearts and minds of the administration at the school as He wills. I need to 1 Corinthians 13 love the school administration and trust God with the rest.
Pray for me because this kind of TRUE love is hard and a moment-by-moment choice.
