Earlier this week, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and went down to the school district to enroll #3 in the public school.\u00a0 I had such anxiety over the perception that these government employees would have about our parenting decisions, specifically our choice to homeschool and our objections to certain vaccines.<\/p>\n
My fears were confirmed when the chipper woman on the other side of the enrollment counter asked, \u201cDid you bring his transcript from his other school and his shot record?\u201d\u00a0 I gulped and handed over the documentation I had.<\/p>\n
\u201cHoney, I need his whole shot record.\u201d She told me. \u201cYou\u2019re missing some on this form.\u201d<\/p>\n
I smiled my best I\u2019m-really-not-a-lunatic smile and said, \u201cNo, that\u2019s it.\u00a0 We don\u2019t do some of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
She rolled her eyes, suddenly exasperated, and handed me a conscientious objector form.\u00a0 It\u2019s the nature of bureaucracy, if you\u2019re going to dare to be different, you have to be prepared to explain yourself.\u00a0 I thanked her and took the form, along with the stack of enrollment paperwork, and went across the room and sat down.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love when the homeschoolers come in here.\u201d She said in a mock whisper to her co-worker.\u00a0 \u201cWe get to see the look on their faces as they discover that teaching kids is hard and you have to be smarter than they thought.\u201d<\/p>\n
I briefly considered explaining to her the physics of sound waves and how they carry across an empty space before rejecting it as argumentative and utterly futile.\u00a0 \u201cI hate public schools.\u00a0 I hate public schools.\u00a0 I hate\u2026\u201d repeated in my brain. I calmed myself down and re-focused on the task at hand, the conscientious objector form.<\/p>\n
With jokes about my lack of intelligence still carrying across the open space, I set about answering the question of why my child hadn\u2019t gotten the chicken pox vaccine.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t help that I had a space one line long.\u00a0 How do I reduce my faith, politics and health philosophies into one line?\u00a0 I finally settled on \u201cThe varicella vaccine is cultured in fetal tissue.\u00a0 As Catholics, we can not materially cooperate in any way with the intentional destruction of human life.\u201d<\/p>\n
I handed the forms to the smirking women behind the desk and walked next door to the Special Education office.\u00a0 The woman behind that desk was expecting me and was much kinder and more empathetic to my fragile emotional state.\u00a0 I told her of the insulting behavior of the enrollment office, and she was truly embarrassed by what she heard.\u00a0 She apologized repeatedly for them and commended my efforts at educating a special needs child up to this point.<\/p>\n
It was then that the loud-mouth from next door came in waving the objector form.\u00a0 \u201cYou need to re-write this,\u201d she demanded, \u201cI don\u2019t understand what you\u2019ve written here.\u201d<\/p>\n
I scanned the document and then wrote on the margin, \u201cThe chicken pox vaccine is grown in the tissue of aborted babies.\u00a0 I can\u2019t play a part in the murder of innocent children.\u201d and handed it back.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope that\u2019s better.\u201d I told her and then turned back to the special ed woman who was laughing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see.\u201d She said, as the other woman left the room. \u201cYou\u2019re not smart enough to teach your children, but she\u2019s not smart enough to understand a simple sentence which you wrote.\u00a0 And she called you dumb?\u00a0 I think there\u2019s an irony there.\u201d<\/p>\n
I smiled back at her. With this woman running things, at least I have some hope for the Special Ed department.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Earlier this week, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and went down to the school district to enroll #3 in the public school.\u00a0 I had such anxiety over the perception that these government employees would have about our parenting decisions, specifically our choice to homeschool and our objections to certain vaccines. My fears […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n