The School Saga Continues

Oh boy.

I thought the school saga for my girls was over. After a lot of searching and repeated visits to two different municipalities, we finally got my daughters accepted to two different schools. My older daughter, Anneliese, was supposed to start school tomorrow, and my younger daughter, Rose, was supposed to start today, after both schools came back from a short vacation.

Before school today I reached out to an acquaintance whose daughter is in the special Ed program in the school that Rose is supposed to go to. I wanted to find out details about when the school day starts and anything else I needed to know since I hadn’t heard anything from the school, so this woman got me the phone number of the woman who is supposed to be Rose’s teacher, so I sent her a message. She said she hadn’t heard of my daughter and wasn’t aware of anyone meant to join her class and to call M, the person in charge of special ed at the school, the one who we initially had our interview with.

Uh oh.

I reached out to M and she told me that unfortunately my daughter is still on the waiting list, there isn’t enough room in the class, and she’ll let me know when there’s a change.

At this point my heart started pounding and my stomach dropped. I thought there was no room in the seventh grade and that’s why they were putting my daughter in the eighth grade class, so I asked further questions to clarify, as well as asking her what she wanted me to tell my disappointed daughter about why she wouldn’t be starting school.

The explanation I was given was that Rose couldn’t join the class right now because the class was dealing with issues that needed to be resolved, and they felt they couldn’t provide her with the support she needed at this time. They said they wanted her to join only when they could give her the best possible support. They also said that it was wrong for E, the person in charge of special ed at the municipality, to tell me Rose could join before the school had finalized things, and apologized for the disappointment and said they would speak to E.

E had told me beforehand that there was a girl in the class that needed to leave the school and they had said Rose could join when that girl left, but in E’s books, Rose would be joining whether or not the girl left yet. Apparently the school didn’t agree. Deep breaths.

Ok. Fine. I cried. I thought this finally was behind us and it was not. I wasn’t given a date when Rose could join and couldn’t just keep her home waiting indefinitely, hoping that the girl would be placed somewhere else already.

This morning, the first thing I did was go to the municipality to talk to E myself.

E wasn’t there when I first arrived, but the woman who was there told me that M had already contacted them the night beforehand to talk about the situation, and it is being worked on. She told me that I could wait for E to arrive, so I did.

When E finally arrived, she was very apologetic about the whole situation and said that what was happening was not acceptable, and there were actually 2 girls that needed to leave the class as soon as possible, because the class wasn’t the right place for them, and they were affecting the class negatively. She said she was sure that the situation had been taken care of already, but only found out last night that it wasn’t, and had she known earlier she would have tried to do something sooner. She apologized for not having been on top of it and taking care of it over the school break. She said that there were options to have my daughter enter the class even if the girls hadn’t been placed in a new school by then, like by having those two girls removed from the class and placed with another staff member from the school, but my daughter should get first priority to join the class over those girls.

E tried calling the school district supervisor to take care of the situation, so we could have a start date for my daughter at least, but she wasn’t answering. E gave me her personal number and saved my phone number so she’d know it was me when I called and could pick up and give me an answer. She told me to give her a call tomorrow to follow up.

So now that’s where the situation lies.

E is trying her hardest to get my daughter to start school as soon as possible, but in the meantime, Rose is home. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to at least get a start date, if not have her actually start.