This post isn’t going to be so long because I honestly have so little headspace for it. I just wanted to update y’all on what’s been going on.
It is September 4, school started 4 days ago, and we still have no school for my daughters.
I have made so many trips to the municipality, both the local one and the one in the city where my daughters were learning until now, and all I seem to have done is tread water, getting nowhere.
Everyone involved in getting kids into schools seems to be on vacation at this critical time of year, based on how empty the offices are. The only way to get anything done is to show up in person, but more than half the time the people there in person are just nasty pieces of work who don’t seem like they actually care to help you.
I brought my kids there so they could see who they are hurting by not finding my kids a school already, and they didn’t seem to care.
I brought a local friend with me to help me navigate the situation and be a bit more aggressive (I just roll over and take it instead of advocating and pushing enough sometimes).
And yet the last time I was at the municipality, I was just told a big fat no. The school we wanted them to go to didn’t have room, and not only that, “We have nothing for you or your daughters in our city at their functioning level.” Then they refused to talk to me more, telling me to take it up with my local municipality.
I then turned to Facebook to try to find solutions for my daughters, to find a school that might be at their functioning level, and got a list of potential schools.
When we went to my local municipality, at least there they were moderately helpful, but still they didn’t know of anything for my daughters. I came to them with some suggestions.
The problem, it seems, is that my daughters don’t speak the local language well enough, so they would struggle scholastically in a regular classroom setting. But the only classes that are appropriate for them because of their low autism support needs don’t have the scholastic support they need, while places with greater scholastic support are for kids with greater autism support needs.
The best option would be a class not specifically meant for autistic girls, just girls with scholastic challenges, ideally one in an art school (and there are quite a few of them in the nearby city). But the nearby city will refuse to place my daughters there because they’ll say that if they just need scholastic support, they should go locally, in our municipality. But our local municipality doesn’t have an art school where my daughters can thrive.
Right now I’m waiting to hear back from the local municipality.
My daughters and I both are not doing well emotionally about this. It’s a hard thing to not be in school and to not know where you’ll be going, and a big deal to be told that it’s because you don’t speak the local language well enough. And that’s part of why they got the autism diagnosis. They’ve each been in school in the local language since the ages of 3 and 5, and they’re 12 and 14 now.
And it’s extra frustrating when there is a solution at hand that just doesn’t seem like it can work because of stupid bureaucratic rules…
I guess I blabbed on about this longer than I thought I would.
Whenever I try to think about the situation, I just crash and go to sleep. When I’m not dealing with the school situation, it seems I’m sleeping.
That’s how I’m dealing with this stress…
