My Experience With The American Education System (Or, The Importance of Education for Disabled People)

So, some of you may know this already, but I dropped out of high school in my third year of ninth grade.
But just to organize my thoughts, let’s start from the beginning.

I was fourteen years old, just out of the mental hospital. My mom and I had tried to get me enrolled in public high school, but they expelled me for “truancy” before I was even enrolled. I would find out later that this required a sort of trial that… Never. Fucking. Happened.

I was sent to an “alternative school”, a school where kids go when they’ve been expelled from public school.

I was subjected to trauma there, the trauma of being the only female in a group of males who had to have done something to get expelled from their respective schools, whether it’s drugs, weapons, fights, harassment, you name it. They harassed me sexually, calling me a “lesbian” and “dyke” and even coding their harassment so the teacher didn’t catch on. I can only describe my first year of ninth grade as “rocky and undesirable”

When I was in tenth grade at that school, we moved to Florida, my home state. Where I could not get into a school. Public school referred me to charter schools, charter schools referred me to private schools, who in turn referred me to yet another alternative school. But I was saved by a collegiate school that decided I was intelligent enough to do dual enrollment (taking high school and college classes at the same time) It was a pretty cozy arrangement, only taking three classes a day and arriving after lunch. But I was unmedicated. I would have panic attacks every day either because of school work or because somebody looked at me. I was traumatized after only a half a year in an alternative school.

The next year, I was specifically asked not to go back to the collegiate school. It hurt so fucking bad. I was personally not only rejected, but deemed unwanted by an entire school system.

So I dropped out at 15. When I was 16, I tried for my GED, in a GED class, only to get depressed and stop going. When I was 17, I tried taking night classes, only to be rejected due to my age. Now, I’m going to try for my GED again, using self-study.

But that isn’t the point of this post. The point is that I am one of many. The point is how many more children will be failed by the American education system because they don’t fit into a neat little box? The neat little box I am referring to is the box of “normal” and “mentally challenged” If you’re not part of one group or the other, you can pretty much go fuck yourself.