Wow. My wife needs your class!
She has two girls who STILL have sepration anxiety about coming to school -- and mothers who enable them, despite counseling from the school staff, because they're too immature to let their children start growing up. Then she has several with diagnosed behavioral disorders, but who aren't getting the help they need because in two cases their parents can't accept that they aren't perfectly normal children and so refuse to allow them to get any special help, and in another case the school doesn't have the resources to provide help. So that student spends a good chunk of his day in the principal's office. P does a better job with him than any of his specialist teachers (music, gym) -- they never keep him for more than a few minutes before shuttling him off to the principal's office.
This is a strange community -- highly educated, but all the educated people are the older, mostly retired people. Virtually everything is service industry, serving either tourists or retirees. So we have no middle management class, just those who own the businesses and the clerks, waitresses, construction workers, etc. So it's a very split community. We have the highest per capita income of any county in the state -- and the lowest average wage. Most counties have incomes from investments, retirement, and the at about 20% of total personal incomes -- in our case, it's over half. And as I said, most of the wealth and education is in the retired population. So there are very few children of professionals or managers, and those that there are ,tend to send their kids either to the small private school which was basically set up by those who didn't want their children in with the children of waitresses and drywallers and plumbers and the like, or to boarding schools. (Our kids all did 13 years in the public schools and are fine for it, but we're a bit of an exception. Even the public school business manager sends his kids to the private school, and one of the five school board members even had HIS kids in private school!)
So while the community seems to be one which values education--a large number of retirees take courses at the local college (we may be the smallest community in the state, if not the country, with a four year college branch campus), the school parent population is, disappointingly, for the most part an exception. |
