Reply to St. Ann’s (NYC) - Private School Horror Show

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "St. Ann’s (NYC) - Private School Horror Show "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here's how counseling-out goes down when you have a ND kid in a private school--and believe me they counsel out kids yearly and usually have it planned--  they call the family to tell them verbally in late November or December giving them the holiday break to process it. They rarely put it in writing --putting instead copious internal CYA notes in writing to the file, in emails, documenting all the meetings. Then in Feb when contracts go live, theirs won't be there- they’ll call again. They never will say " we don't support autism and dyslexia"--instead they will point to loads of issues that are specific to the kid's learning style and navigation of the social environment. They need the message to be blurry (and the data on the kid they want out , to be extensive) so they can pick and choose who they like. Autistic but the family is powerful or loaded? Maybe! Dyslexic but the kid uses a lot of support services up and is on financial aid? Maybe not..

When enrollment is down, these kids get carried,  year after year after year— and when enrollment is up, they bite the bullet and counsel them out decisively. So parents get constant mixed messages, and when the time comes to say goodbye, whether intentionally or not, the blame is placed squarely on the kid “ they can not support” and on the kid’s inability to "meet the expectations of the environment". They will always blame the kid -in subtle ways and in soft warm thoughtful tones.

It is insidious and very much enrollment driven, donation driven and diversity driven--schools are much more comfortable counseling out white kids as there is less liability. Prior discussions of problems with the kid years back are a somewhat irrelevant pattern once the contract is offered. Contracts speak much louder than meetings. Signed contracts come with serious ethical but not legal obligations to support students and families in healthy kind ways. The dilemma for schools is that they do "sort-of" know that the process of pressuring kids and families to leave ( which includes a lot of passive aggressive criticism of parenting styles, detailed deconstruction of the kid’s flaws, intense observation and documentation of any little aberrant behavior and learning lapse ) causes severe emotional harm and creates a psychologically unsafe environment-but what can they do?.. it’s a litigious world - they’re  protecting themselves —and I am sure St Anne’s is ready for this lawsuit with a big fat horrible file on a well meaning bright but dead …child.[/quote]

One DC Big3 school determined a high school student had to repeat a year, because the student had so much chemotherapy he had to miss a considerable amount of school. The parents agreed with that. [b]Then the school determined that the student could not go to a school dance with his classmates who’d been his classmates since a young age after a year of fighting cancer[/b]. The child was unnecessarily devastated.

Are the schools there to serve students or students to serve schools? And who at the school is this all serving?[/quote]

Did the child repeat sophomore year and the dance was a Junior-Senior dance? I could understand the child’s disappointment in this scenario but it would make sense to me.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics