I was in the resource room pretty much every day right up until 5th grade. For Elementary school, we had 2 recesses a day, twice a week one of my recesses would be spent in Occupational Therapy. I was also taken to OT every time they showed a movie or video in class, and I'd still have to take the test on the video even though they didn't let me watch it.
For Middle school, I spent 6th and 7th grades at a little tiny school 45 minutes from my house. The school had 50 students total, in 5 10 person groups. Each group spent their entire day together, and my group just happened to be the most disruptive group, so I didn't really learn anything for both years. They realized that and put me back in public school for 8th grade.
That little school also had another thing about it, they treated everybody like an adult. I got used to that, I got used to being allowed to have a drink with me in the classroom, I got used to being able to sit comfortably, with my feet up on an unused chair, stuff like that. When I was put in the public school, I had no IEP, and no provisions for special ed. This was doomed to fail from the start. I was still on essentially a 5th grade level, but I was being expected to perform on an 8th grade level. This lead to teachers assuming that I was lazy, and since they were only told that I went to a private school, they assumed that the reason I was failing was because I wasn't being challenged enough, so they pushed even harder. After about 2 months of failing everything and being sent to detention for "not taking the class seriously", they finally figured out what was wrong, so they had me take all of my classes in the Resource room.
That's when things got really interesting. For one thing, the kids that were my best friends in 5th grade didn't want anything to do with me. After 2 years, I was the "new kid", and being an obvious SPED kid, didn't help. I had hardly any friends, people that used to be my best friends didn't even remember my name, but since everybody just called me ret*d, everybody else followed suit.
The public school teachers were even worse, every time I had a Tourette's Syndrome tic, they assumed I was being disruptive and would send me to detention, it took another month for them to finally bother to check my records and see that I actually did in fact have Tourette's Syndrome. Once they realized that, any time I had a tic they hadn't seen in anybody before, they would still assume I was doing it for attention. One teacher even said "I worked with Tourette's kids before, and they don't act like you do, so stop making fun of people that actually suffer from it". I even had one teacher say "do you want to be rich like Bill Gates? do you think he could've gotten where he did if he didn't pay attention to his teachers?" This is of course ironic since Bill Gates was a high school drop out.
After another unproductive year, I was about to go into highschool, still on barely more than a 5th grade level. The school board realized that I wouldn't get anywhere in the public highschool, so I ended up at another small highschool, again 45 minutes away by the short bus. This school wasn't much better than the school I was in for 6th and 7th grade, except that this school was on the grounds of a public high school, so I constantly had a reminder that I wasn't normal. This school didn't challenge me, they gave me 3rd grade work (it actually said 3rd grade edition on all the textbooks). I spent a year working as hard as I could. Sometimes they'd give me a book and tell me that this was my assignment for the rest of the month. I'd finish the assignment within 2 days, and they'd just give me more of the same crap.
I was so fed up with this that I was ready to commit suicide, nobody would take me seriously, they just treated me like everybody else in the class. The worst was how whenever somebody acted out in the class, the teachers would say "real high school kids don't do stuff like that", despite their being a mainstream classroom right next to ours, and yelling could be heard all the time. They used this thing they called "Reality Therapy" where as they continued to run the class like a kindergarten, every time someone had an issue with something, they'd say "well, nobody's going to help you in the real world". So that was it, be treated like a kindergartner, but be told that we're supposed to act like adults.
After 2 unsuccessful suicide attempts, I tried smoking Cannabis. Once I started doing that, I could concentrate my thoughts better. I even got other ideas, like every day during lunch period, I'd walk down the halls of the regular high school, looking into the rooms. Any I saw something interesting, I'd stand in the hall outside the door, or sit on the grass outside the open window and listen. I learned more that way than any other way.
Eventually, by my Junior year, they decided that I could start taking what they called "mainstream" classes, where I could take regular highschool classes. They decided that I could take up to 3 classes in one semester, but I would still have to take the rest of my classes in the sped school. Whenever a mandatory class was going on in the sped school, that would take precedence over the Mainstream class. Because of this, I was a highschool Junior taking Freshman's classes, and even though most of the classes went 5 days a week, I could only be in them for 3 of the 5 days each week, yet I was still expected to fully succeed. When I turned 18, and I found out that I had the ability to sign my own early release notes, I started having "doctor's appointments" almost every day. I'd dismiss myself from school, go to the real school, and take my classes. This was the only way I actually learned anything.
The sped school was an 8 year program, but my town was only willing to pay for 4. After 4 years, I graduated on a 9th grade level with all Ds. That's when I found out that the sped school didn't give out diplomas, and that my town didn't give them out to students who weren't schooled in town. My mother fought this tooth and nail, and finally I was allowed to get a diploma from my town, but I would have to attend the graduation ceremony. This way, I technically graduated from a school I had never even set foot inside.
All in all, I've learned a lot more over the internet than I did since 5th grade.
23 May 2009, 10:40 pm
Sounds like the school I went to in middle school and high school. I didn't think such a school existed outside of LA. Been in special ed since preschool actually - the only times I haven't been were elementary school and college (I'm in college now). I liked the school I went to back in PreK, the teachers and staff were really nice and I got along with a lot of the kids there. Unfortunately things (eventually) got kinda bleak with the school I went to in middle and high school. Practically no one who went there liked it, actually. Personally, I loved the fact I was able to make friends at that school like I never had before! However, I was also severely bullied at that school and because of how menacing some of the kids were who went there, the staff treated us like the things those kids did was ALL of our faults when clearly it wasn't! 
