A breach of trust at the highest level.
One of the biggest impacts, I think to parents’ mental health when serious issues arise at school is the broken trust. The realization that the people you entrusted your child with 5 days a week, 6 hours a day, actually don’t have their best interests at heart. Or they have no idea what they are doing. It turns out they are less trained and educated on disability and mental health than we thought. They will put the school’s liability needs and staff needs first. We are shocked that people are lying to us. We can’t wrap our heads around it.
Parents often aren’t able to articulate why they have been so driven to search for answers, or advocate so hard, to email constantly or to file a complaint. When it is named and identified as broken trust, the injustice of a boundary violation, it hits the nail on the head. They understand what has been driving them. It all starts to make sense. Then there is the injustice of it all.
There are two harms. The first harm of the incident or what has happened. The second harm is how the school handled it.
How do you send your child back to school after there has been a breach of trust? Some incidents are very serious. A child has been restrained, and they had no idea, only finding out months later. You had no idea your child was being locked in a room for hours, until you showed up at the school unexpectedly. They were injured, police were called, or other incidents, with no explanation.
After the incident, the school goes into defence mode instead of repair.
Cover-up instead of transparency and accountability.
It really can send people spiraling. If your mental health has tanked because of what is happening at school and how the school is responding to you, you are most certainly not alone. Not only do our children need help when they lose their trust in their school, but so do we. When students refuse to go to school, they can feel fear and not feel safe. Underneath all of that, I think it can be a sign that serious trust has been broken. That even if they feel they will need help, they know they won’t get it, and they are on their own.
It doesn’t need to be a single incident just months or years of neglect.
We can end up being trapped. Circling over and over on unresolved issues.
When our children start school, we AUTOMATICALLY trust the adults in the system. They are all knowing. No one questions it.
Especially what hurts is wondering if we didn’t trust the adults would we have made different choices? Would things have been different for them? Did they suffer more because we were so ignorant? Could we have protected our children better? If that isn’t one way to torture ourselves, I don’t know what is. The societal brainwashing message that parents should be automatically trusting the education system needs to come to an end.
We can trust them. But they need to earn it. With their behaviour. Not their words.
Or can we ever trust them?
