Ds7 is having a hard year, with a school placement where he doesn’t have the support he needs to be successful. I’ve been trying to get the necessary paperwork to apply for a different school for the coming year but I’ve been completely roadblocked by the foster care agency and social services.

In the beginning of November I took the twins for psychological evaluations that included an educational component, but despite being the one to make the appointments, take each of them out of school for the day to go to the appointment, sit with them throughout the entire evaluation, meet with a psychologist for over an hour for each of them, meet with the evaluator with my husband and I, and spend hours answering detailed online questionaires of many (hundreds?) of questions – I wasn’t allowed to see the results because I’m not a professional that needs to see it.

That was insulting and offensive to me. Everyone gets to see the results except the people who raise him?!?

Anyway, back to the technical issue – without having the evaluation, I couldn’t submit an application for a new school.

When the foster care agency finally received the assessment and sent it to ds’s school, the principal told them it doesn’t contain critical information necessary to know what kind of framework will meet his needs. Months of waiting for the results of this evaluation, and it doesn’t even contain the necessary information.

I said I would take him for the necessary evaluation and pay for it myself, but the foster care agency refused to allow me to take him, claiming it would be too hard on him to have to do another evaluation. (I told the social worker that the evaluation isn’t any more demanding than a regular school day for him.)

He’s having a hard time at school since he really needs one on one support in order to learn and appropriately socialize, and his frustration comes out when he gets home.

He’s been experiencing emotional regression since the beginning of the year, which I’ve expressed concern about to our social worker repeatedly. The positive changes when he left challenging behaviors behind in the first year with us were very encouraging, but it’s been sad and alarming to see it go in the opposite direction.

When he came, he acted like a very young toddler. He spoke in a babyish way, pointed at things instead of talking, and moved in an affected and unnatural way with mincing steps and small movements. My interpretation of these behaviors is that he associates being loved with being a baby, it’s become his position of emotional safety, so this is his emotional armor.

We did so, so much work to move him beyond this, for him to deeply internalize the feeling that he’s safe to be big in our home. He stopped doing all of these things – we hadn’t seen any of these behaviors for eighteen months.

Two months ago on Shabbos afternoon he hit the lowest point we’ve seen so far. One of our teens said something to him after ds7 hit ds8, and ds7 became very verbally aggressive and offensive towards that teen. My son brought him to me to help him get regulated, but nothing I did helped him. He became an infant, repeatedly trying to lay in dd’s wooden doll cradle as he said ‘ga ga’, wadded up fists, and an artificial high voice and tiny body movements. I kept him with me for over an hour, trying to help him relax and feel safe, but for the rest of the afternoon he continued acting like a small infant.

(Two days beforehand, several seventh grade boys in his school bullied him. This was obviously frightening for him, and was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. )

His descent into infantile behavior was deeply concerning for me. It’s upsetting not be able to get help to find him a more suitable school placement for next year, and not to be able to do anything to improve his current school situation. (Overall the school is fine, but his needs are much more intensive than what they are set up to handle.) As long as he remains in this school, all that’s left for me to do is try to manage his behaviors at home, which are challenging.

I initiated an appointment with the foster care therapist/advocate a couple of months ago to see if there was anything we could do about his school situation. She said she would set up a meeting of everyone involved, which finally took place a few days ago – it was his principal, teacher, the therapist, our social worker and me.

I wasn’t expecting much from this meeting, thinking it was ‘too little, too late’ as he needed help from the very beginning and here we are towards the end of the school year. I was pleasantly surprised, however.

The therapist said she had done extensive research into all of the schools all over the north part of Israel and there wasn’t a single option that would meet the needs of ds7. That being the case, she felt that he should stay at his current school so that he has continuity, and get one on one support inside the classroom. I don’t know if that’s possible or what that would look like, but that’s the direction that that will now be explored.

This doesn’t immediately help ds but I do feel there’s some official recognition of the difficult situation ds is in, and there’s now an attempt to get him the support he desperately needs and I appreciate that. I don’t know what will come of it, but knowing he can stay at his current school takes a lot of pressure off of me. I spent six months last year trying to get him a school placement and finally got him this spot where he is now just a month before school began. It was such a relief.

Then the school year began, his behavior quickly deteriorated and the relief was very short-lived. For the last few months I’ve been going through the same school placement issue as last year and it’s been draining and infuriating. I’m constantly feeling like I’m banging my head against a wall with no progress to show for my efforts.

In the last couple of months he’s made some gains from the extreme infantile behavior, but it’s still pronounced. I suppose all of this is teaching me patience – maybe? – because dealing with social services is all about waiting and waiting and waiting for someone to do something to help a child. I find this hard and wonder sometimes if to continue parenting him I have to become jaded and accept the limitations of the foster care system, and not think about what that does to the child.

There’s the reality of so much bureaucracy surrounding every single decision that needs to be made that everything is painfully slow. I see that those who work in the system have an acceptance of this glacial pace that I don’t yet have. If I did, it would make it much easier for me emotionally, but I don’t want to become a person who can see a child suffering and then say, ‘oh, well, that’s how it goes; yep, that’s a shame’. I haven’t yet found my balance in trying to help ds7 while accepting the limitations of the system. but I think that just understanding how limited the system is and not expecting anything is an important first step.

Avivah