We registered the kids in school, knowing that we were "the enemy," and we would watch and monitor what they were going through.

I had resigned my position as a teacher in a district completely disconnected with the district we had been dealing with, fully expecting that we would be moving on by the fall and that we would not have to deal with these people again. Thankfully, we would be leaving the first grade and moving on to the second grade with Chase. You see, Chase was placed in the classroom of the wife of the superintendent of schools the year before, and any other placement would be an upgrade.

You see, this placement placed us in a place where we would be constantly looking for the enemy. We had gone into enemy territory. What we didn't know was that this teacher was completely unbalanced. Even though her husband was the superintendent of the system, she was soaring through an unbalanced place that no one else could see. (I would later find out that she was found crouching in the corner of her classroom, when she was in charge of a classroom of first-graders...she was rocking back and forth in the corner of her room...she was never called on it, because her husband was the superintendent of schools, something you can obviously get away with when your husband is a member of the hierarchy of the school system. I certainly hope that this woman is no longer a part of any public school system.) We tried to get through this year, and I think that we did an okay job of it. After all, we emerged with our daughter, and she seemed to have survived it okay.

We had been through so much that year. We tried to get the school system to give Chase the services she deserved, and we were met with the school system's might at every step. They had no desire to meet with us and to help with any kind of therapies or help with our child's disabilities. We had been through numerous and numerous hours of meetings with school officials before this time, with the superintendent at the "helm," and we felt that we could endure anything that the school system could throw at us at this point.

We had seen this school system face meetings with the people who came to help us with our struggles with the school system. We had not enough resources at this time to hire private resources to help us with our struggles, so we were fortunate to come into contact with a group of people who had made it their mission to help people who come into contact with school systems who make it difficult to get their children into regular education situations. They were remarkable. We had an educational specialist who was wonderful and would talk with us whenever we had the need; we had another educational specialist who had physical disabilities that would come into play later; we had a lawyer who was blind and made one of our ARD meetings so priceless that we have never been able to tell him how much we appreciate it.

Our 24-hour meeting was such a laborious endeavor for us. Even though we were both educators, we didn't have any idea of how to deal with this bureaucracy. We felt so inadequate, but we had the support from our group that we had enlisted. They were wonderful. We didn't ever have to pay anything for their services (they were a non-profit group, and they were sent from God, as far as we were concerned), and we got to witness the other people in the room make fools of themselves (which was absolutely priceless, when we needed every little bit of entertainment that we could get). You see, our lawyer (who was blind), was able to name everyone in the room (which was about 20 people) after one introduction, and our supporter (who was physically disabled, and he knew that the school system had not made the mandatory changes to the physical campus), and he put the whole school system in its place when he pointed out the indiscretions in the system, and about the physical outlay of the system that had not been corrected and clearly violated the policy that had been passed by the government. You see, he could not pick up his feet high enough to get to our meeting without the help of his friend (our blind lawyer) to get him over the curbs.

We weren't pleased to be continuing our experience in this school system, but we knew that our daughter wouldn't be placed in the classroom of any relative of anyone related to the hierarchy of the system we had been dealing with for such a long time.

Okay, enough of these memories for now...it is so hard to revisit hard times.