This is a semi-rant I guess because my school sucks and they decided they're going to completely ignore IEPs and 504s and other such things and be stuffty as forget. roosters out, boys, because we're going to circlejerk.
My school isn't really a school, it's a program run by my district. I'd love to say it's a magnet program for good students, but it's the opposite. I've been historically a good student. My cumulative gpa is somewhere around a 3.8 for the previous years of school. I've never failed a class and I've never had behavioral problems. I have stuffty genes so some of my organs don't work really well and my immune system sucks, so I was sick a fair bit my sophomore year. I had a medical excuse, but the school refused to acknowledge it and instead sent me to this stuffty "alternative learning" program for "truancy" (despite me having notes from multiple doctors saying I was in their care and had a reason for being absent.) This is where the real fun starts.
This program is full of terrible people, both academically and morally. If you're not rich, white, or black, then you pretty much get stuff on. Being somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% american indian and being middle class, I get an absurd amount of stuff daily from richardheads at this beautiful program. Our campus uses a system called "PBL," or "project based learning" where most of the work in classes is larger projects vs smaller individual things. The problem is that, in essence, PBL is group-work. I'm a good group member, usually doing 110% of my share to ensure a good grade for myself. We're usually in groups of 3. The problem with this system is that the other two students refuse to do their portion of the work. This is incredibly frustrating because then, I'm being held hostage with no ace in my sleeve. Either I don't do the other members' work and get a stuff grade, probably failing the project because they don't care if they fail and aren't planning on doing their portion either way, or I do all of the work, get a good grade, but give two lazy richards the same good grade.
This has become a problem to the point of having to go to the school and change my IEP to say that I would prefer individual work over group work and should be given an individual project if possible. An IEP is basically a document that is an individual plan for a particular student and how the school should approach various issues with them. By law, the school has to follow it to the word. More on this later.
I've gone through a year and a quarter at this school of people not doing any of the work for themselves and that's frustrating. What's even more frustrating is the attempted bullying by other students. The things they do and say aren't particularly hurtful, but the part that makes my blood boil is that the school refuses to stop them. I've got a strong constitution for the most part, but the fact that said behavior is allowed to continue for over a year is really beginning to piss me off. Not only that, but I've made it clear to the school that this is going on and they always say they'll "deal with it" and "thank you for bringing this to light," the usually rehearsed bullstuff to cover their asses.
To sum this up, the school is a broken system that allows lazy students to get good grades and punishes motivated, good students by making them do extra work. When everything except final exams are group projects, that's kind of a big deal. To top it off, the school refuses to do anything about harassment that's not particularly hurtful, but they send the message that they won't stop that kind of behavior in the future.
tl;dr get stuck in stuffter school with stuffty people for a stupid reason, district wont let me leave and everyone is osama.
