I just got done with my kid’s annual homeschool evaluation, which means it’s the anniversary of when I pulled them from school.
This right here is from the last meeting I had with the school. Spoiler alert: their plan did, in fact, not work, and they suspended my kid within the week for behavior that was a direct result of said plan being completely inappropriate for the situation.
The real problem was that they were being bullied, constantly. The real problem was sensory issues that no one wanted to accommodate. The real problem was that my kid was PDA in one of the demandiest places on earth, school.
The real problem was that the school saw my kid’s completely understandable reactions to their completely distressing and unsupportive environment as “the real problem.”
And this is the problem with behaviorist approaches. More often than not they assume the problem is in the kid, not their environment. (This is especially true in schools where lack of resources leads them to do everything they can to avoid accommodations by putting the onus on the child to “adapt.”) More often than not they don’t even attempt to ask the kid what’s up. More often than not the “function” they assign is bullsh!t, and so is their attempt at a solution.
So yeah, happy homeschooling anniversary to us. I only wish I had put a stop to the trauma sooner.
(Image description in Alt Text.)
