Teacher Threatens To Quit Over Six Year Old

A while back I talked about how my son was starting at a new school, and alluded to the fact that I was very unhappy with his old school. While I wanted to write a scathing report on them at that moment, I wanted to wait and see if things changed for my son once he was in the new school.

So let me start by filling you in on the old place. It is a large daycare in Peoria that also has a kindergarten program. Brody started there about a year and a half ago in pre-K and then moved to kindergarten.

In pre-K he was pretty well behaved, but also had some crazy days, like all kids that age. His teacher had been in the business for a long time and handled him well and there were no major issues. Everyone in the building loved Brody. He helped out the teacher by reading to the other kids and basically did all he could to please.

Over the summer he was diagnosed with ADHD(I’m not getting into that here) and was of course put on meds. He started Kindergarten with a new teacher. She has only been teaching for a year or two.

Things went downhill. All the sudden Brody’s behavior at school was getting worse by the day. We tried adjusting his medication. Talking to his diabetes team about issues. Took him to a behavioral therapist. Had evaluations done. Nothing seemed to fix the problem at school. We tried anything we could to make things easier for them.

Eventually they started sending him home early if he got “out of control”. Of course this was frustrating for all of us, and we continued to search for solutions and suggestions for the school to try to get the problem solved.

Then my ex called a meeting with the school to talk to them about how things were going and some concerns we were having about everything, because in our mind things just didn’t add up. We felt like there was something we weren’t getting straight information about.

The school director decided to go on the offensive during the meeting and told her that the school was probably going to expel Brody by the first of the year if his behavior didn’t improve, because she “Couldn’t lose a teacher over this”.

His teacher threatened to quit if they didn’t get rid of a six year old student that has type 1 diabetes and ADHD.

I had a talk with her about the issues at one point shortly after that, and the teacher remarked to me, several times, about how she just didn’t have time to deal with all of Brody’s “issues” while she was trying to teach 11 other kids.

So we started talking, quietly, to a lawyer in Chicago about our options. Once the school figured that out, they immediately backed off kicking him out. They suddenly found extra money in the budget to put an assistant in his classroom. Of course that meant that as soon as he looked at someone wrong, he had 2 people all over him. They then started sending him home two to three times a week for “bad behavior”… basically trying to get us to just pull him.

The last straw was ridiculous. They have a green, yellow, red system for how the kids do on a daily and weekly basis. So one day Brody was at school and at naptime asked for a band-aid for a scratch that he had on his wrist. The teacher refused, and he asked again. She knocked him down from green to yellow for that. Then that afternoon he was sitting and writing math problems on scratch paper during free time. She told him he could only have one piece of paper. He made a mistake on one of the problems he was writing and threw the paper away and asked for another one. She changed him to red. Seriously? A bandaid and a second sheet of paper deserves that?

She was an unorganized, weak minded woman that held a grudge against a six year old. Her issue with Brody was that she didn’t want to have to deal with his diabetes, and she picked at him until we pulled him out of school after she threatened the school to quit if they didn’t get rid of him.

So fast forward to the new school. The entire staff loves him. There are no behavior issues. His new teacher(25 years on the job) said he is the most polite kid in class. She said(and has the support of the principal) that although she has never suggested it for one of his students, he probably needs to skip ahead to first grade. They love him, he loves the school, and he is flourishing there. The school also has two other kids his age that are Type 1 diabetics.

If someone is telling you there is an issue and you really try everything with your child and can’t figure out what the problem is, maybe it is the accuser. Maybe it is a horrible teacher, and maybe you should find a new school before that teacher does permanent damage to your child.

If you are looking into a daycare in the Peoria, Illinois area…. and one is named after one of the three hospitals, let me know. I may be able to give you some good information.

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