Kids not to blame for broken school system

I raised three very intelligent children, and it was an uphill battle from the time the first one entered high school.

My oldest ended up dropping out because he was thwarted on every side, regimented to distraction and the classes were dumbed down to the point of mind-numbing stupidity. Never in my wildest dreams did I think a child of mine would drop out of school. But he did.

Keeping my second child in school was a struggle. He was bored out of his mind. The only thing that saved us was joint enrollment. He finished school at Southern Polytechnic where he was treated to classes that truly challenged him. My daughter was lost in a sea of kids in high school. She was never encouraged or challenged by the majority of her teachers. She had only one teacher who didn’t treat her students like they were always up to something bad.

She got fed up and wanted to finish high school at the night high school because she could finish at her own pace, and not be held back by the other kids in the class. However, we were told that if she did, she couldn’t walk with her class at graduation. That was important to her, and to me, so we struggled through to graduation.

Schools are more like jails, and, until they change that model, kids will leave in droves. If research were done, it would likely show that it’s the intelligent kids who are dropping out, the ones who have different learning styles besides repetition and regurgitation, listening and repeating. It’s a cookie cutter approach in a world of individuals.

For example, in middle school, my daughter never had an opportunity to talk to her friends, except at lunch. No talking in class, no talking in the halls between classes, no free time to just be friends.

When my daughter and I were looking into registering her for night classes, there were over 400 kids trying to register for the same night high school. When you have that many kids bailing from the regular school system, someone somewhere should say “Something is wrong here!”

But no, they just throw more money into a broken system, and then shake their heads and blame the kids for why it isn’t working.

> Nancy Sutton lives in Acworth.