Why we moved to a public charter school

Blog Challenge "100 posts in 100 days" Post #19

My son Chandler is brilliant, vibrant, witty, loving, and since the first week of pre-k, public school has been a source of frustration, rejection, and it provided a large audience of kids (and their parents) and teachers to misunderstand him. 

Two separate doctors used three different assessments to diagnose him as ADHD. I did not want him on medication, and I fought it for two more years before I decided I would take off work and spend an entire week sitting in his classroom observing him amongst his peers before finally giving in and agreeing to try a medication. That decision was the start of what would be a long, uphill battle. 

I plan on dedicating several posts to this topic and talk in more detail about our experience (through my eyes), but for the sake of keeping this blog post short, I'm going to jump right to the deciding factors that encouraged us to transfer to a public charter school for 7th grade. 

Chandler struggled to connect and make friends at school. He would forget his homework at school, leave his books in his locker, do the homework but forget to turn it in. One week his teacher would call to recommend him for advanced classes and the next week a different teacher would suggest remedial course work. 

He was beginning to get in trouble a lot. I received so many phone calls that I started to panic and experience extreme anxiety each time my phone would ring, and I saw that it was his school calling. 

By the end of 6th grade, I was exhausted and completely at my wit's end. I was worried about the impact all of this was having and afraid that the consequences were more than we could handle. 

The environment Chan was in was not constructive. He wasn't learning; he was surviving and just barely doing that. His attitude slowly started shifting to a more negative tone, and I feared he was becoming depressed. 

I fully believe that you are the five people you spend the most time with and since he was getting in trouble a lot, placed in isolation or grouped with other "troublemakers" I worried that it was only going to make things worse. 

A change was necessary, and we are fortunate enough to be in the type of situation that allowed for us to be hands on enough to try going to a public charter school. 

I've read many articles in the news recently that paint charter schools in a negative light, and for the most part, I see their point of view. But as a mom, I'm so thankful that we had the opportunity to experience school differently and thought I should share.