My wife Kathleen is awesome.
Feb. 18th, 2012 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seawaspShe's always BEEN awesome, of course. She's a stay at home mom, which means that she's doing more work than most of us do, and she's doing it most of the day. Especially when you have four kids ranging from 15 down to 2.
Plus she's a great artist and a gamer and a general geek and that's what lets her put up with ME.
But right now she's taken awesome to a new level.
The local school district, North Greenbush, actually only runs ONE school: The Little Red Schoolhouse, which is Kindergarten and First Grade. Upon graduation, the kids have the choices of going to Troy, Wynantskill, Averill Park, or East Greenbush schools.
All of our kids go to East Greenbush so far. East Greenbush is a VERY good school district, ESPECIALLY for kids with special needs (which includes ADHD, Autism, and Apergers' spectrum, which basically means all my kids); it is ranked #5 in the STATE in this area. Averill Park is a middling-good district, ranked #27. The other two... well, they don't rank, let's say.
So we get a letter last week telling us that North Greenbush is considering (in language that indicates "we've pretty much made up our minds") dropping East Greenbush from the choices.
One should note that North Greenbush was very stubborn about not evaluating Gabriel properly for various problems, and because of that it took four more years of battling (with both us and the teachers of East Greenbush working together) to diagnose and get Gabriel in a program that WORKED. Now it DOES work, mostly, and he's doing well in school. Yanking him out of this carefully tuned curriculum and dumping him somewhere else could be disastrous. And we have Vicky leaving Little Red next year, and Domenica will start her schooling in a few years.
They also announce a meeting to "discuss" this change. It's on this Wednesday.
I'm flying out for a presentation that day and I won't be back until Thursday.
So Kathleen calls our friends the Palmers, gets people to watch the kids, and goes out to the meeting -- and has also written up and gives a TOTALLY AWESOME SPEECH. I read this speech, and I want to say I LITERALLY COULD NOT HAVE WRITTEN IT BETTER MYSELF. It laid out everything that had to be said and did it with precision and passion and accuracy. She silenced the board members, apparently, when she read it; those who had been trying to argue that "your kids will be FINE at Averill Park!" stopped saying that entirely. Other mothers came and thanked her for speaking.
Kathleen is totally awesome, and that's one reason I love her. :)
Plus she's a great artist and a gamer and a general geek and that's what lets her put up with ME.
But right now she's taken awesome to a new level.
The local school district, North Greenbush, actually only runs ONE school: The Little Red Schoolhouse, which is Kindergarten and First Grade. Upon graduation, the kids have the choices of going to Troy, Wynantskill, Averill Park, or East Greenbush schools.
All of our kids go to East Greenbush so far. East Greenbush is a VERY good school district, ESPECIALLY for kids with special needs (which includes ADHD, Autism, and Apergers' spectrum, which basically means all my kids); it is ranked #5 in the STATE in this area. Averill Park is a middling-good district, ranked #27. The other two... well, they don't rank, let's say.
So we get a letter last week telling us that North Greenbush is considering (in language that indicates "we've pretty much made up our minds") dropping East Greenbush from the choices.
One should note that North Greenbush was very stubborn about not evaluating Gabriel properly for various problems, and because of that it took four more years of battling (with both us and the teachers of East Greenbush working together) to diagnose and get Gabriel in a program that WORKED. Now it DOES work, mostly, and he's doing well in school. Yanking him out of this carefully tuned curriculum and dumping him somewhere else could be disastrous. And we have Vicky leaving Little Red next year, and Domenica will start her schooling in a few years.
They also announce a meeting to "discuss" this change. It's on this Wednesday.
I'm flying out for a presentation that day and I won't be back until Thursday.
So Kathleen calls our friends the Palmers, gets people to watch the kids, and goes out to the meeting -- and has also written up and gives a TOTALLY AWESOME SPEECH. I read this speech, and I want to say I LITERALLY COULD NOT HAVE WRITTEN IT BETTER MYSELF. It laid out everything that had to be said and did it with precision and passion and accuracy. She silenced the board members, apparently, when she read it; those who had been trying to argue that "your kids will be FINE at Averill Park!" stopped saying that entirely. Other mothers came and thanked her for speaking.
Kathleen is totally awesome, and that's one reason I love her. :)
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Date: 2012-02-18 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 12:04 am (UTC)Go Kathleen! As the son of a long-time psychiatric technician and special needs teacher, I fully understand how important the right program run by the right people can be.
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Date: 2012-02-19 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 06:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 06:47 pm (UTC)