Marguerite
Active Member
Could you stand the thought of home-schooling? It may not be the disaster you expect it to be. If a lot of the problems are because other kids at school are causing him grief, or teachers have stopped trying to control unruly behaviour (especially aimed at other kids) then that could be enough to disrupt him badly at home.
We found difficult child 3's anxiety ramped up to the point where he appeared to be physically ill with some mysterious gastric malady that caused vomiting and low-grade fever. I could not leave the area to attend doctor's appointments or even do the shopping, because I was always getting called to fetch him from school because he was sick. I had to de facto home school him on and off for a year. The problem was finally confirmed as extreme anxiety. By then I had seen that his behaviour improved and his studies also improved, when we worked at home. We had a strict rule (to avoid rewarding illness behaviour with a holiday from school) of "school work during school hours". I had to buy some cheap resources for him to work on at home because the school never gave us enough. Some of what we let him do at home - we let him watch documentary DVDs, play educational computer games and so on. They really made a huge difference to him academically. From there we eventually enrolled him in a correspondence school and he has done well until now. Currently struggling, but he would struggle more back in a school setting.
Our kids went to disadvantaged schools at times. Our local school doesn't have disadvantaged status but should have. The older three went to an inner city ghetto school that had a breakfast program and a homework program. easy child left the homework program because she said she felt like the "token white kid". The school ended up eliminating midweek homework, replaced it with a quarterly project done over a month. The academic results for that school were an inverted Bell curve - a cluster of high achievers (a lot of uni staff and students sent their kids there) and a cluster of major learning difficulties/academic delay. Not much in the middle.
You could come live in our area if you wanted - it's a cheaper part of Sydney because we're in an isolated little pocket. But I would not recommend you use our local school!
Marg
We found difficult child 3's anxiety ramped up to the point where he appeared to be physically ill with some mysterious gastric malady that caused vomiting and low-grade fever. I could not leave the area to attend doctor's appointments or even do the shopping, because I was always getting called to fetch him from school because he was sick. I had to de facto home school him on and off for a year. The problem was finally confirmed as extreme anxiety. By then I had seen that his behaviour improved and his studies also improved, when we worked at home. We had a strict rule (to avoid rewarding illness behaviour with a holiday from school) of "school work during school hours". I had to buy some cheap resources for him to work on at home because the school never gave us enough. Some of what we let him do at home - we let him watch documentary DVDs, play educational computer games and so on. They really made a huge difference to him academically. From there we eventually enrolled him in a correspondence school and he has done well until now. Currently struggling, but he would struggle more back in a school setting.
Our kids went to disadvantaged schools at times. Our local school doesn't have disadvantaged status but should have. The older three went to an inner city ghetto school that had a breakfast program and a homework program. easy child left the homework program because she said she felt like the "token white kid". The school ended up eliminating midweek homework, replaced it with a quarterly project done over a month. The academic results for that school were an inverted Bell curve - a cluster of high achievers (a lot of uni staff and students sent their kids there) and a cluster of major learning difficulties/academic delay. Not much in the middle.
You could come live in our area if you wanted - it's a cheaper part of Sydney because we're in an isolated little pocket. But I would not recommend you use our local school!
Marg