My child is home from school again

My daughter is home from school again.

Last term, the school assured me that they were working very hard. They had a plan in place, they told me. They were very positive about this plan, had worked hard on it as a team, and thought it would work to address the underlying distress my daughter would express when she was overwhelmed, overstimulated, and/or dysregulated.

Reader, it did not.

We opted this term for half days, thinking it would ease things and provide a needed reset for all concerned.

Reader, it did not.

The school has a hard and fast rule of automatic 2- or 3-day stand-downs for any violence by a student. In principle, I whole-heartedly support this; I do not condone physical violence, not at all. And yet, if all behaviour is communication, what is a child trying to tell us when they have no words available to them?

Learning disabilities and cognitive (dis)function are hard. When my child gets overwhelmed, like many others with the same challenges, she loses the ability to speak and the capacity to verbalise how she is feeling/what she needs. Instead, she pushes away her teacher aide (learning assistant) in frustration and anger. This then results in an automatic two-day standdown.

When she pulls the fingers (repeatedly, to be fair!) at her teacher, when she pushes away her teacher aide and pulls off their name tag and throws it away, when she lies down on the ground screaming and refuses to get up, when she runs away - she is desperately trying to communicate her distress.

This distress can be hard to hear over the behaviour, but it is there, nonetheless.

It is up to us, as adults and professionals, to hear that distress. This can be challenging when the words aren’t there to describe or explain.

It is so very tough for a disabled 11-year-old who loses their words after the sensory input of a school assembly and who needs to be left alone to calm down for a bit to be able to explain this in any way. When one’s words are gone, all that is left is to push away the person getting all up in their grill.

And so, a standdown is implemented, because that is the rule.

And so, my child is home again.