Just to clarify - this is full on blindsiding. No advance notice that led us to come to meetings unprepared.
Unfortunately, a clever way to stack the deck in their favor. In a trusting environment, one would not suspect a thing... after one meeting like this families often learn to ask in advance for an agenda... or another meeting.
Another concern that I have with so many families here saying they left the schools when they encounter these situations is that may very well be the intent behind some of this.
Yes, that may not be uncommon.
She didn't count on us getting very serious... much more rare than parents throwing in the towel and moving to a new district, placing their kids in privates or deciding to home school.
These experiences change us, don't they.
Just some food for thought about *why* some of these hostile situations may occur with our kids whose needs can be so difficult to meet.
Agreed. Some schools also find PG academic needs too difficult to meet, even without need for 2e accommodations. In any of these cases schools may concoct ways to spin things, possibly including trying to provoke a negative emotional response at a meeting. Sometimes we read on gifted forums that a child "wrote too well" causing a teacher to suspect them of turning in work which was not their own original composition. Even after student work passed plagiarism check software, and several impromptu pieces of similar quality are written on demand and under supervision to prove ability, such unfounded allegations can cast a long shadow. This is just one example. There are a multitude of ways in which schools may attempt to discredit, ostracize, and marginalize students/families. Families may think it cannot happen to them, until it does. It may take some months before a family is able to process this, connecting all the dots and seeing the pattern, meanwhile the pattern may be clear early on to others who are not as close to the situation.
