When There’s No School for Your Child

I’ve been talking with a few families in my district lately. They’re struggling to find the right school for their children. And it hit me—I never really found one for my own son either.

I guess I didn’t fully put it together back then—that there wasn’t a school out there that could meet his needs. Because in the end, he did graduate. Not in the traditional way, but through a small, quiet ceremony. The most important thing is that he has his high school diploma.

But getting there… let’s just say I’m certain it took at least 20 years off my life. And for him, it created a deep distrust of humanity that I can never erase.

The families I’ve been talking with have different stories, different struggles. But we share one heartbreaking truth: we never found a school for our kids. There is no placement for children who have survived years of being forced to mold themselves into environments that were never built for them.

And here’s the hardest part: all of this could have been avoided.

If their needs had been truly identified—not just addressed through surface-level emotional supports—where would they be now?

Would my son have gone to Senior Prom?
Would he be in college today?
Would he have walked with his class on graduation day?

I’ll never know the answers to those questions. And although my son made it through—alive—and is thriving now that he never has to step foot in a public school again as a student, this should never have been his story.

Too often, schools focus only on what they see on the surface: the anxiety, the frustration, the withdrawal. They put counseling on a 504 plan or write an IEP for “emotional disability” and call that support. But emotions are rarely the root problem—they’re a symptom. When schools take the time to dig deeper and identify what’s really causing those emotions—a learning disability, processing issue, language disorder—everything changes. Because when you address the real barrier, those emotions often begin to heal on their own.

But when the answer is delayed—because the school never looked past the behavior or the feelings—the child builds trauma year after year. And that kind of trauma is hard to recover from.

In my experience, both as a mom and as an advocate, schools are reactive—not proactive. That has to change. Because when schools operate through a reactive lens instead of a proactive one, the damage it creates can be nearly impossible to fix.