Family goes 'Don't bother with that/that wont work'

Post Reply New Topic

The most you can hope for 16 years after the fact is finding out from the school system if they still have the paperwork pertaining to the incident and if you can see it. It would have the reason spelled out. It would have to. The problem is

1)it might take a lawyer to do that- that's a lot of money for closure

2)the paperwork may no longer exist


The problem with suing is that you probably don't have a case. If any documentation on this incident exists, it will be the school's paperwork where they explain why they did it- probably very briefly. What you don't have is any paper evidence that it was unjustified. All you have is your memories and that won't be good enough for a suit. The time to have fought this was when it happened. That time is long gone. It is best to move on because attempting to force closure on this from other people won't work. The other students in the class won't remember accurately (people pay scant attention to the problems of their fellow students), the teacher himself is dead, and if any surviving members of the school system do remember, they will remember that in their opinion it was justified since they are the ones who did it.

It isn't worth it.

I totally missed on first read that it was that long ago.

things were very different then. it's very difficult to get records from the schools in the first place, and some, I found, are impossible even for parents of minors to get for a period of time within 5 years. the schools don't hang on to things that long, and 16 years is ancient history.

if it was something that happened within the last few years I'd say go for it, but since it's so long ago you'll likely just be spinning your wheels.

I know what it's like to have your whole mindset stuck in events from your past. I still have trouble with it. Basically, it comes down to a choice: you can either spend the rest of your life getting angry about things you can't change or you can strive to move on with your life and find new things to do with your time. It's been about four years since I had my trouble and those feelings still exist in my mind, but the more you focus on your daily life the more those feelings seem less important to you.

ok yeah, it's probably been too long.

But it sucks that I didn't get much help from my parents when it originally went down. They just accepted it. That IMO was the wrong thing to do.

sometimes parents are stuck between a rock and a hard place. my son's school did the same thing to him, and I didn't know the magic words "IEP" so although I kept asking the school for help and asking if there were resources for emotionally disturbed kids (yes we had to work through the emotional component before we could even figure out there was a developmental issue) they kept shrugging me off and my kid ended up going to a horrible school that made things worse for him until I found out about IEP and pulled him out of school pending his assessments.

as a mom, I can say I've had to accept things I didn't like at all, and I imagine when you were a student there were even fewer opportunities for parents to get help for their kids. I know when I was in school there were none, so I ended up dropping out, which didn't seem to bother my mother at all. I also ended up a drifter since her own mental health issues made my life hell, so I bounced around from place to place for a while. luckily my dad took me in because he didn't think I was a bad kid, but there wasn't anything he could do for me educationally. I eventually worked it out myself, got my diploma and went to college.

on his deathbed, he did voice the opinion that he thought school was good for one thing, and that is ruining kids