A's first day back to school was not so stellar. They made major changes to the system for 3rd years, which they didn't bother to tell us they were going to do, so the kids were blindsided. I can't imagine A is the only one who is freaked out. For the first 2 years of high school, the kids were in a set class and they had the same teacher all day. The work for the first 2 years doesn't require teachers to be certified in specific subjects....it's the general stuff in each subject, just like in elementary school. But starting in the 3rd year, teachers have to be specialized in the subjects they teach. The model they use in the first two years doesn't work anymore, but our understanding of it was that the kids remained in one classroom and the teachers for each subject moved around between the different classrooms. But there are only 2 classes of 10 kids at A's location. Rather than hire a teacher for each subject, they have this online system in which they share teachers with other schools and the teachers aren't physically present in the classroom. Work is done online and submitted digitally, and then the teacher grades it and sends it back. They never actually meet their teachers. They have to go to school, and there's a "mentor" in the classroom for them, but that's not how they actually get their assignments and instruction. They've apparently used this system for years, long before Covid made remote learning necessary, so it's nothing to do with that. But they didn't tell us this. So A came home from school and was talking about this system we had to get login info for, and we thought it was just something like E's school uses to post the schedule each day and their homework assignments, but it's not. He actually gets instruction via this system. He said he needed a book today because they have an hour of reading per week with their first book report due in 7 weeks, so they had to bring a book today because their hour of reading is this afternoon. They gave us no time to get to the library to actually pick out a book. Good thing we read a lot, so we had him covered, but he was panicking about needing a book, and it has to get approved by the Dutch teacher, so we asked who the Dutch teacher is so we can get approval. He doesn't know who his Dutch teacher is. This is how we discovered the system. When we logged into the site, it has all the teachers and their subjects listed, but you don't know which one is your kid's teacher. Not to mention the link the school sent for this computer system didn't work, so we couldn't log in. We had to google it to get signed up. So he has homework that he doesn't understand and no way to contact the teacher because we don't even know who the teacher is. This should have been communicated at the end of the last school year so we understood how the system worked at the very least. And there's an information evening planned to teach the parents about the system....in 4 weeks. I'm sure we'll get used to it, but it would have been much better if they had even sent a letter out saying 3rd year works differently and they would be working with this system so we could have checked it out in the vacation and prepared him for it. It's a school specifically for kids on the spectrum and they know how important routine is and how difficult change is for these kids. How did they NOT tell the kids there was a MAJOR difference in the structure starting in 3rd year??
