Being Run Over

There we were having my 4 year olds preschool owner/director telling me that my child was different from every other child in his class. That his social/emotional maturity had actually regressed and the progress that they’d hoped to see hadn’t happened. She told me there was something wrong with him- she just didn’t know what. Yet, she gave me a computer print-out about Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Teacher #2 with whom he’d had the confrontation with, stared at me like I was raising Satan himself whenever I entered the room.


The day it all went down, I wondered if she would be able to get past it. Would she hold it against him? Should I go ahead and move him? But the school itself was supposed to be good. It had a waiting list and everything. Surely, if anyone could work with a special needs child it would be a staff of teachers with masters degrees in early childhood education, right…right?

The previous teacher (who teacher #2 replaced) was wonderful with him. She did tons of 1 on 1 with him and worked with him while teacher #1 ran the group lessons. I assumed he had assimilated and was doing well. After all at home he was singing songs, reading three letter words, adding and subtracting- where in that would I have a clue that anything was so horribly wrong? Then she took the summer off to stay home with her kids. A week and a half after teacher #2 came in is when the incident happened. Then in my meeting with them, I was informed that my child screamed every day- several times a day, refused circle time or to cooperate in general. When I pick him up, I get a slip of paper that tells me the day’s activities and I speak with the teacher- not once had it been written down or told to me that my child screamed every day or that there was anything concerning about him. Why would you not mention that to a parent? One day everything’s fine the next I’m sitting in a chair in the owner’s posh office being run over by a Mac truck.

I’d approached the previous teacher concerning his behavior a couple months after he started at the school. He still threw temper tantrums and I told her that I was concerned because there was a big disparity between his cognitive abilities and his social/emotional abilities. She had explained to me the two parts of development couldn’t develop at the same time. They would eventually even out and she didn’t see any cause for concern.

Four months later and a month and half with teacher #2 and we were cordially invited to find another care facility for him- because he was just “too out of control” and they were “unable to handle a child with his needs and their large class sizes.” This was told to me almost two weeks to the day before his evaluation for SPD- four weeks after our meeting over the incident.

I’m still trying to digest it all. Did they really just get rid of him while they could still classify him as a “behavioral problem” and not a child with special needs?