BeckyScott
<font color=magenta>I am still upset that they don
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2007
- Messages
- 1,127
Unfortunately, and I know that you'd never do this, if a child is behaving the way you describe, and if there is no appropriate behavior plan in place or the school isn't trained... this is exactly how our kids end up locked in supply closets. You all call the police, some schools don't.
Although I don't know how calling the police and EMT is going to do anything other than having the family "hotlined" and DSS breathing down their backs. If the parents are totally ignorant of the situation and need a wake-up call maybe DSS is appropriate. But if they're trying and aware and already on their last nerve...
(I will digress briefly. We got hotlined 2 years ago. Although I never got the full details... it was something like this... DS was wheezing in PE. One staff member said something to another one about it, and was told that DS's mother had said not to use his inhaler because they cost too much.
Another staff member overheard them. Nobody said a word to me when I picked him up that day, but he wasn't wheezing then. Right after school someone from the school hotlined us. Or so the story goes. Here is the true story, I believe... DS had been sent home three days in 2 week's time because the nurse said he had pink eye. Each time, we had to make an appointment to take him to the doctor for a note before he could come back, us missing work and him missing days every time. He had hay fever, he did not have pink eye. The third visit, the doctor specifically wrote the note saying the child had hay fever and that his eyes would indeed be red for another month or so. DH took the note to the nurse that time 
and as usual when we send the DH's to deal with these things, he said some fairly rude things to the nurse and loud enough the entire office heard it. The very next day allegedly this incident happened and DFS was at our back door, having received an emergency hotline that my son wasn't being given his asthma meds. Call it coincidence if you want. On top of that, DS was on Medicaid at the time, so we weren't paying for the dr visits and we weren't paying for the inhaler, and of course DFS had access to that information so they knew that when they showed up. It made no sense. All it did was send me into a complete nervous breakdown. If there is one thing I'm not, it's oblivious to DS's medical needs. Why would a mother say she can't afford meds when the kid is on Medicaid? But it had been reported, so the lady had to stay until DH got home from work to interview him, make us sign a bunch of papers about our rights, she had to interview several people at the school... I was going to go up there and throw a fit, but decided to take the high road on it since I was afraid DFS would get called again. I don't know what happened, but the next year there was a new nurse.) Okay, too long a story. The point being, getting hotlined may be fine if the parent is ignorant, but it is just awful if the parent is aware and trying to cooperate. I'm afraid that bringing in the police is just a one-way ticket to having all kinds of people in your business, judging you, and getting you in some big computer database of bad parenting. Which none of us need. I very obviously was not at fault with DS but now our names are in the computer at DFS, and I betcha if we ever get hotlined again, they'll dig that old info back up. How many times does that have to happen before they're looking at foster care and you're looking for a lawyer?
No, I don't want my child in a classroom where there is another kid throwing furniture. But there has to be a middle ground somewhere. And I think that middle ground is having a plan in place, a reasonable one, with both parent and school input, and to actually use the plan.
I think, back to the OP's story, there was a classroom with 7 kids, a teacher, 2 aides, and 3 evaluators... ??? And nobody could take the time to pull him out, away, to find out what was wrong, or nobody saw it coming? And it sounds like they *assumed* his prob was due to the lack of ADHD meds, and not something else with his disability that provoked a reaction. As I'm sure we're all aware, if a child is being unruly, shoving Adderall down his throat will fix the problem.
Who is to say he wouldn't have done the same thing even if he'd taken his meds? And on top of that, my kids are both ADHD, and I don't think throwing things is really an ADHD symptom exactly, don't remember that from the DSM, the only time oldest DS did anything like that is when the Adderall wore off, the anger was caused by crashing off the Adderall. It was the problem for him, which is why we don't do it any more.
