Terrible leadership at this school. Favoritism and retaliation is rampant. The Principal's behavior is toxic. Many families have opted to leave, including staff and children with IEP's.
If you are a large financial donor or connected, your child will most likely be protected from this.
An interesting article illustrates forms of abuse very well:
Forms of emotional abuse are: ISOLATION - Physical confinement; limiting freedom within a person's environment. The group leader says it is for your own good and that it will teach you life skills, but for you it is an emotional horror show. Can you imagine the emotions that you would feel? Singled out in a group of twenty, publicly labeled as a loser too stupid to follow the rules, the subject of derisive and degrading attention, isolated, even terrorized by the psychological horror, you would be traumatized for a long period of time, maybe for life. And this would be true even if the group you were in was relatively supportive. Even if they downplayed the social isolation and public shaming, you would still feel it at a deep level. We are social beings after all and as the great Robert Merton said, we get our self-image in part by the way others see us. And if we think others are seeing us as some stupid loser (which is the intent of socially isolating someone in this fashion) then that is how we are going to see ourselves. And that cannot help but have a negative, disturbing, impact on us.
Forms of emotional abuse are: DEGRADATION - Your illustrious leader has isolated you and degraded you in front of his or her charges, and they are likely to do the same. Human beings, children, adults, learn what is modeled to them. If an authority figure models isolation, degradation, and abuse, chances are that the people watching are going to do it to. Sadly even when you leave school, even when you leave isolation and re-enter the social fabric, degradation is going to follow you. This means that the deep psychological, emotional, even spiritual trauma of the initial event is going to be revisited on you over, and over, and over again. If this sounds like hell on Earth, you would be right. Even adults buckle and break under the abuse of degradation. And it has just gotten worse. Adults model emotional abuse to children, and children take the hammer and bring it down even harder.
Forms of emotional abuse are: REJECTION - Refusing to acknowledge a person's presence, value or worth; communicating (by word, deed, or example) to a person that she or he is useless or inferior; devaluing her/his thoughts and feelings. Of course, the sad thing is, it is a lot worse than just your personal feelings about it. The reality is most groups would not be supportive. A lot of psychological research in the sixties (look up Zimbardo's prison experiments) showed very clearly just how ugly it can get for people who are publicly separated and isolated. People, even close friends and family, turn on you when an authority figure labels, isolates, and rejects. There can be a snowball effect. First, you sit in the middle of the room and feel bad, while the authority figures treats you with derision and disrespect. Then the people around you start to treat you differently. They laugh and point fingers and find other ways to isolate and exclude you. They avoid you at recess, talk behind your back, titter and laugh and extend the boundaries created by the initial isolation. Pretty soon you become a bonafide social pariah, avoided by all and excluded by many. From a social control perspective, the whole things works very well because having experienced that kind of trauma once, you will never want to go through it again, and so for sure you will jump into line and tap along with the tune provided (either that or you will conform to the anti-authoritarian stereotype). But of course, once you have been labeled and humiliated, rejected and degraded the long-term emotional damage is done.
The outcome of emotional abuse: Emotional abuse of children can result in serious emotional and behavioral problems, including depression, lack of attachment or emotional bond to a parent or guardian, low cognitive ability, and educational achievement, and poor social skills. One study consistently found them to be angry, uncooperative and unattached to their primary caregiver. The children also lacked creativity, persistence, and enthusiasm. Indeed, children who experience rejection are more likely than accepted children to exhibit hostility, aggressive or passive-aggressive behavior, to be extremely dependent, to have negative opinions of themselves and their abilities, to be emotionally unstable or unresponsive, and to have a negative perception of the world around them. read more
