Where We’re At Now

 Well, to say it’s been a very trying, disappointing, upsetting, and stressful couple weeks would be an understatement. The very short way of summing it up would be to say that our battle with the school and the local police has come to an end and I’ve had to pull Thing 2 out of school for his physical safety and his mental health

I’ll go into our journey in upcoming posts but a quick recap is that Thing 2 has had a bully from the first week at the school when we moved here in 2020, and it’s only gotten worse. It came to a head when he let us know he was being called horrible names (f’n f*g, f’n furry and more) on a daily basis, he was attacked in the gym change room, spit on, and that’s just some of it.

I knew something had to change. His behaviour was changing, he lost all self confidence, he was acting out, and, well…. It went to a dark place. My 12 year old’s exact words when asked if he ever thought about hurting himself were, ‘I don’t want to hurt myself but if I did maybe the school would actually do something about’-…let’s call the bully Don, like Don Johnson in Bridges and Nash which in Hebrew means serpent so it’s kinda fitting.

I honestly think that I was within a month of losing my little boy, forever. I know in my heart of hearts that if we as parents hadn’t stepped in, our world would have been forever altered. My little man didn’t feel safe at school, he wasn’t being heard, the people he thought were supposed to keep him safe weren’t. We had to do something. We had him counselling, we had talked to the school over and over and over, we had talked to the police and they made him feel like he was worthless and not heard. I had to do something different and stand up for him and know he is loved and I would do anything in this world to help him. We couldn’t rely on the people who were supposed to help us to actually help us. He had one teacher actually tell him to quit complaining and she didn’t want to deal with it when he confided in her that he was being physically hurt and bullied.

The most frustrating part of all this was that even though the school knew this had been a problem for years, they either wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything. Their advice was to involve the police, which are already involved with ‘Don’ for a variety of reasons including groping young girls. The same police that we had already gone to when Thing 2 was getting death threats and did nothing (I’ll do a whole post on that whole situation).

So, I guess, this will be our journey. There are options out there. There are avenues to explore. There are this you can do that the school system and the police won’t tell you. There are resources you can utilize. YOU CAN DO THIS! You know your child better than anyone. You will find support and you can be your child's biggest advocate.