Reply to How do Spence, Brearley, Dalton, Chapin, Trinity, and Nightingale differ in terms of student body

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a fellow public school parent who has also suffered through the problem of one kid taking up too much of a teacher's attention: a $70k/year school ought to be able to figure out a way to manage that. Heck, even a wealthy public school will have a team of paraprofessionals to pull out kids with extra needs for a big part of their day; the private school I went to 30 years ago was a whole lot dinkier than St. Ann's and yet they had a whole separate track for kids with ADHD, with their own schedule and low-ratio classes and so on. There's no reason on earth why St Ann's couldn't afford to hire a couple of people to ensure that students with learning differences are well taken care of.

Also, telling them *in February* that the kid can't return for 9th grade is particularly awful because it means their high school choices are essentially a) go to to whatever private school still has room and will take your kid, b) go to whatever public high school you get assigned to with no applications and no SHSAT, or c) move to the suburbs.[/quote]

I'm the poster from above. Completely agree with you about February. I must have missed that part of it. Agree that that really tied their hands and was not cool. That changes my perspective. If you are going to counsel out, you need to make it so the child has a chance of successfully landing elsewhere. If they truly were told in February, they had no chance.

I do not think that private schools, no matter what the cost is, have an obligation to help kids with special needs. There is only so much they can do. There is a difference between a bit of extra help and building a whole universe around a specific kid. It sounds like the school you went to had several kids like that, so there were economies of scale. Doing something like this for one kid with extensive needs (unclear how extensive the needs of this kid were - that is a big part of the debate - I am speaking more generally) is not realistic. But it needs to be a process where the two sides work together. Because St. Ann's is generally more welcoming to non-traditional kids, the parents assumed that that included their different child. But this was a different situation. It is very unclear what the school told the parents and how much of it the parents chose to hear.[/quote]

I first heard about this case when someone posted about it in the Private School forum. [url=https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/DocumentList?docketId=Ulp_PLUS_HbU7t69L8imZGN9yxw==&display=all]Someone had found the dockets and shared them in the thread.[/url]

If the school psychologist is to be believed, this was an ongoing conversation for several years. The parents knew there was a chance he wouldn't be offered a re-enrollment contract, and they'd already applied to other schools before the administration at Saint Ann's made its final decision.

I don't know if it was the right choice to deny him a spot in the high school. Given that kids had been locked in at home for a year by this point, it would be hard for anyone's academic performance to really improve under the circumstances. But Saint Ann's didn't just pull the rug out from under the family. I can't imagine a judge siding with the plaintiffs.[/quote]

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