Okay, so I've got some issues with my son that I've really got to get to the bottom of, and I guess I'm a bit stumped on what to do with it all. My son's been getting in trouble more and more lately, primarily in his afterschool program. He's hated that program for a very long time. At first I thought it was primarily because it was cutting into his videogame time, but I'm really starting to think that there's a lot more going on there than I was aware of.
Unfortunately he's ended up falling in with some of the more dirty mouthed and trouble prone kids in the school there. I think it's probably because they
move around a lot, and when the kids were looking for new friends he ended up finding them due to the fact that everybody else already had a bunch of friends
from previous years at that school. I can't very well expect him to finish the
school year without any friends, so I'm trying to help teach him to make the right choices when those friends are doing things that'll get others in trouble. I think he's been doing pretty well with it, all things considered, but there may be some bias going on with the staff there, as well. I don't know if it's some form of racism or another bias (my son being half African), but whatever it is I think I'm going to have to go talk to the school about it.
One of the first things that happened is that somebody left a purse with money in it laying around at the school and he, plus one of his friends (whom really don't trust) ended up being around it at one point. When somebody found
out that there was missing cash from there, they ended up looking for clues from the class as to where it went. Turns out that most of the class fingered my son and his friend about it. I trust my son for the most part, but I don't know if maybe his friend did something and took that money (I really don't trust the kid or his mom-- the kid alone is a bucket of unending lies to try to
have something interesting to say); or maybe he did get my son to try taking something... It's so hard to know for sure.
After that, I ended up going in to pick him up one afternoon and showed up right at the same time that one of the staff who I think might have a bit of a grudge against my son was pulling him and two of his friends out of class in order to 'make them stop being so negative.' She was literally shaking with rage, and the kids were all telling stories about how she'd pushed one of them.
I don't know what happened with that, due to not being there to see it, but I do know that whenever you've got somebody in charge of others who is shaking with rage like that that something bad happened and could easily have triggered
her into some inappropriate actions, too. She had just sat them down to write some sentence about being negative 100 times, but I was picking him up at the same time. I ended up grounding him for that one, primarily because I knew that something bad had happened, and I figured it was as good of a time as any to try to make sure that my son is steering clear of others' negative behavior,
even if it is funny or amusing at the time. Seems to have worked well here.
Yesterday, though, when I got back from work, I heard a pretty disturbing tale of my son being accused of 'sexually harassing' some of the girls in his class. Now this little bit is really taking the cake, because I'm 95% sure that my son has problems talking to girls about most things, and he's hyper aware of his actions when he's around them. It turns out that him and some of his friends were discussing male genitalia and semen for some reason, and it sounds like that was the primary cause that they got in trouble. Now while I can understand that perhaps the topic wasn't appropriate for a school environment (though I personally don't believe that myself-- it's a school, kids are learning, and kids will talk), I don't think that telling a kid that it's a legal offense that could get them thrown into juvenile hall is the best way to deal with something like that. It got even worse when I checked my voicemail last night and ended up finding out that one of the other parents had
been around when it actually happened, and _she_ was calling me because she saw
the instructor/supervisor there deal with things in an inappropriate manner, not the kids.
Now this isn't the first time that I've had to deal with crap from this school. I think that the truth of the matter here is that there are true aspects all around, and improper dealings with things all around, as well. The
difference being, of course, that the adults in the situation that are dealing with things inappropriately are serving as role models, and need to learn to keep their emotions under control when dealing with children that are supposed to be looking up to them. I think that my son has fallen in with some bad apples, and at the same time he's going through such a rough and stressful few years that he's almost certainly acting out some on his own. I've certainly seen bits of it here, as our domestic situation has failed to improve in any way. Unfortunately work only makes dealing with this crap harder.
So now I have the decision about how far involved I'm going to get with all of this again. Even if my son _is_ guilty of all of this stuff, I don't think that it was handled appropriately. I've had to go and head off a bunch of this
junk before, last year, when the lunch staff was harassing him in front of a bunch of other kids because of a paperwork error that had his free lunches tallying up money due incorrectly. Ugh. I really just don't want to have to deal with this crap, but alas, I cannot let my little man deal with all of this
without properly finding out what's going on here.
Gah. I've got more that I was going to write but I'm frustrated enough already from having to think about this so much for now. I'll probably be writing more on this as it develops. There's actually some other issues that need to write about, too. Not this early in the morning, though. ;)
Hope y'all are doing well.

-D
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