Oh, I completely agree with you that he has to learn all that - but a classroom full of special needs kids - many with emotional issues - is probably not the best place for a special needs kid to learn that. With a few years of maturity, he may be able to be thrown back into that environment and handle it with maturity - but he isn’t doing so now.
I have no idea of the extent of Alice’s son’s needs - but it is possible that emotionally he is not thirteen.
This is a well-respected and high-scoring TUSD school way, way out on the eastside- supposedly a “good” school. He’s had this problem in another TUSD school, as well. I find it ironic that the year he spent in an Amphi school in a bad neighborhood was in the most controlled and peaceful class he’s ever been in.
I have done this with local government, not federal. But only after following, and documenting, normal channels.
I just googled Arizona anti-bullying law and apparently Arizona has had one since 2005.Link Sounds like your school is not following the law.
Stop calling them. Document as much as possible, then if you can take a day off, go to the school & demand to speak to the principal, school counselor, etc. refuse to leave until you do & if they threaten to have you arrested for trespassing, call every friend you have who has some connection with the school & who is willing to stand up for you & harrass the hell out of the school. And if you need to call the media, then get over that shyness & do so.
Hmm, I had a very different experience with bullying, at least in some sense.
I was bullied pretty visciously throughout elementary school and middle school, and hands down the worst years were the middle school ones. I don’t know what it is, but something about that age just makes some of those bastard kids the meanist sons of bitches out there. Even though I’ve always been a proponent of kids standing up to and fighting back against bullies, that entire strategy does have its share of limitations; simply put, the fact that a kid might stick it to a bully doesn’t mean that the bullying will stop. I experienced that firsthand, so I can tell you, fighting back against an asshole kid won’t necessarily solve your son’s problem.
There is a caveat to that, though. I used to know a guy who openly proclaimed that he was a mean, viscious bully as a kid. What did he say happened that made him decide to stop being a bully? He was literally knocked out after a kid that he had been terrorizing surprised him with a two-by-four against the back of his head. All of which is to say that, ultimately, there might an individualistic element to this whole thing.
For me, the bullying just stopped altogether once I got to high school. Granted, I went to a different HS than the majority of my fellow middle school students ultimately attended, but still, I doubt that my experience would’ve been much different even if I’d gone to the same school as everyone else. The cessation of bullying just happened organically for me, really; I matured enough to the point that I guess I wasn’t so much of an easy target anymore, and I ended up becoming a pretty popular guy, with friends spanning all of the differing HS cliques. A part of me wants to say that HS students are more mature than their younger counterparts, given my personal experience, yet I know that that isn’t entirely true because a few of the friends that I had in HS were themselves getting bullied at the time that I knew them.
The whole thing is a real mess, to be sure. I feel for your son, and from firsthand experience I can attest to how terrible bullying is. At the very least, I can assure you that AT SOME POINT things will get better.
Would switching your son to a regular classroom, with some special-needs support, be a possibility?
Unless the school is attended exclusively by demons, he might find some outreach and companionship among the non-special-needs population.
When it is said that he needs to fight back, the fighting back needs not to be physical. Our daughter is relentlessly picked on at school. She is, much to our chagrin, quite a smartass at home. So, we have taught her to fight fire with fire. Any verbal jabs she receives are responded to with well-practices jabs we have taught her at home.
Sometimes, a well-placed verbal jab that gets the other kids to laugh at the bully is better than any physical harm that could be done to them (after all, the goal of bullying is the segregate your victim, not just hurt them).
ETA: I would also document each incident of bullying and your follow ups. It will help when the admin claims they don’t know what you are talking about (and they will).
Hi! I joined specifically to respond to your post. I’ve been lurking & loving this board for awhile!
There seems to be the thought that staying at the school will “teach” him to handle the bullying, and, that its an important life lesson. While I agree that your son needs to develop the skills to cope & eliminate the bullying, I dont think there’s anything wrong with finding a new school. As adults, if a work situation becomes hostile, and/or negative, we move on and find a new position elsewhere. I think finding a new environment to start over in is a perfectly reasonable response.
However, I really feel for your son. If this were my child, I’d view it as a crisis situation. His anxiety level sounds dangerous. I’d find a therapist immediately to address the anxiety and also to work on giving him the tools to handle the bullying. I’d also remove my child from the school if things didn’t rapidly improve & start over at another school once my son got over some of the anxiety/panic attacks. Search “teaseproof your child” on love and logic, if you have time. This article gives kids a “one liner” technique to deal with potential bullies.
IMHO, forget lawyers and the idea that the school might help. Concentrate on getting your son help for his anxiety attacks and on giving him the tools to help himself. Knowing how best to help our children is difficult. Keep us posted.
Dan Savage and his husband put together a video project and book after a lot of gay suicides last year.
Direct your son to these.
I was bullied in school for being smart, fat, and different.
The reasons for the bullying are just details, letting your son know he can get past this, that it won’t last, that THEY are the losers will help keep him strong.
Meanwhile, keep fightin’ the school for the apathetic rule-quotin’ fools that they are.
David
I haven’t read all of the responses, but your OP has touched me. I was bullied as a child, being overweight. The only thing that stopped it is I finally figured out I was bigger than those doing the bullying. I stood up one time, knocked a few heads and no one every bothered me again. Unfortunately your child doesn’t seem to have this option and in this day and age it is not encouraged to knock a few heads together.
Quite honestly if the principal isn’t going to be bothered to help you and your child I would consult an attorney. I suspect that the issue will be resolved rather quickly. I wish you the best of luck.
It’s called hormones.
My experience mirrors yours-and realizing one day when I was c. 14 or so that I was subtly encouraging it by being pre-emptively snarky helped.
Today school was closed, so still no calls back. So I won’t have anything new to add to the thread until early next week.
This weekend we’re going to watch those It Gets Better videos. I hope that it will help him to feel better. I know I sound like an overprotective mother, but there are a lot of factors that have created that- he’s my youngest, my last baby, he has a disability with ongoing medical problems, etc., so I don’t really think it’s unreasonable that I am zealous in protecting him. Although, I do take care to hang back and not embarrass him directly in front of other kids. When he was younger, I was much worse- there are neighborhoods we’ve lived in where I am a legend. 
One good thing that he has going for him is that he’s very good-looking. Not to be shallow, but we all know that ugly kids get it really bad. And so far in his quest for puberty, he’s almost exploding- his bones are getting big. (It’s so weird when that happens.) So maybe soon he’ll have the strength of a big man going for him, too. Maybe one day he’ll be protecting me.
When I was in grade school, I was bullied and the school really didn’t want to do much as the bully was the scion of a wealthy family. A nun (I was in Catholic school) taught me some basic self defense. As she was teaching me, during sparring, I missed her hand she held up and I whacked her right in the eye. I thought I was going to condemned to hell because I hit a nun. She sported a duesy of shiner. Just that story spreading around the school caused the bullying to decrease somewhat. They figured if he had the balls to smack a nun, no telling what he’s capable of. Also, my gramps who was a wrestling champ in the Navy during WWII taught me a move that caused me to win several battles. Just grab the attacker by his little scrotum and squeeze with all your might. They won’t touch you again.
If you do move your son to a different school, try this: Talk to the principal, his new teacher, and anyone else you can speak to about what’s happening now (give ghastly details) and tell them that you’ve heard that this new school is much better than the old school. (It doesn’t matter if you’ve actually heard that or not.) Then ask them what they do to make it so much better. This gives them something to live up to, and lets them know that you’ll be watching.
I was bullied in my junior high school and moved into a different unit–same school, different teachers. Things got much better. My mother used this technique.
I hope this helps, or that someone else’s advice does.
I would definitely contact the school board - a classroom full of emotional-disturbed kids does NOT give them license to ignore the bullying rules; hell if anything it makes it that much MORE urgent that they control the behavior. It sounds like their attitude is “these kids are thugs, so of course they’re going to beat up on the other kids, we don’t need to do anything about that beyond keep them away from the GOOD kids by locking them in this classroom”.
I have found that too often, kids get warehoused despite their individual needs. For Dweezil it was OK for the most part - there are sufficient kids with autism that he was always in classrooms with somewhat similar needs, but his last summer at summer school (4 week program to help kids avoid losing ground on their educational goals), due to randomness of boundary lines for the summer program, he was separated from all the other age-peers in his autism class, and assigned to a completely different school, with nobody he knew.
At not-quite-7, he was the highest functioning kid in the classes. The youngest kid, aside from him, was at least 10 years old, I think the average age was 11 or 12.Everyone else in that class was more severely challenged - from my own observation, it was a mix of mental retardation, more severe autism, and who-knows-what else.
Needless to say, we never enrolled him in the summer program again.
Do get your son to a therapist to deal with the anxiety, stress and, yes, the anger-management issues. However well-provoked those are, the school is just going to use that as ammo to say “see!!! He’s just as much a thug as the other delinquents!!!”.
If there’s an organization that specializes in your son’s disability, contact them to see if they have any suggestions as well. They might even know how to find an educational advocate / lawyer.
Thought of Alice after seeing this news article. Even the teachers can be bullies. :eek:
Update, of sorts.
My son had to go back to this school, because nobody would ever return my calls about getting him transferred to another school, and I know that after 5 days of absences, I could be in legal trouble for truancy. So, I sent him back and he went for a couple of weeks, same problems, same old shit.
Last week, at the beginning of the week, he got beat up in the bathroom during the day, and right before he got on the bus to come home, another kid spit right in his face. That was the last straw for me. I have kept him home since then, and I’ve been communicating with the district head of special education. I have advised her that he won’t be going back to that school, no matter what, and I’ve asked her to help get him placed in another school. She responded a couple of days after that to tell me that she spoke with the school, and that one of his bullies left the school, and that the school told her that they have new procedures in place to deal with bullying. In the meantime, he got his report card, which was all d’s and f’s, which has never happened before. I advised this woman that she must have misunderstood me, because there is no way that he is ever going back to that school- we are done with that school, his report card being further evidence of the apathy of his teacher. Also, the last couple days that he was there, he complained to her about being bullied, and she asked him if he was hearing voices in his head- in front of the classroom! I thought you were supposed to tell- I didn’t know that he would be publicly humiliated and accused of having a mental illness!
Anyway, so I have also been in touch with the school district ombudsman, who hasn’t gotten back to me yet, but must have been in touch with the woman mentioned above, because she is clearly not happy that I’ve been in touch with her.
So right now, son is at home for the second week, and I’m in a stand-off with the school district over their refusal to put him in a different school. I have an appointment later this week with an attorney.
Also, in the meantime, I have gotten him into the behavioral health system, where he can get counseling and medication, if needed. He is being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder, which, while I don’t wish it on him, would really help our case, if there were to be any case, against the school district.
I’m going to reiterate what I said earlier, because the school (administration) can be just as bad as the bullies themselves…
Good luck, and fight the good fight!
As a former teacher, I can only say that if he returns to another school, or the same, and the bullying continues, he HAS to stop fighting back. I know it’s not fair, but to me (and many other teachers), a student who fights back, calls them names, uses rude gestures, etc, just loses all credibility and goodwill. So he really needs to stop that. I know it’s difficult to explain to him, but if most teachers were like me, he’ll never get their respect until he stops doing what he’s doing in response to the bullying.
I also agree strongly with taking your issue to the superintendent and the school board president, with as much documentation as you possibly can. Then, if nothing else happens, your local state representative or local state senator would be great options.