A New School Year Begins

Emmy is always very excited about the beginning of a new school year. She enjoys learning, meeting new people, finding out who will be in her classes, etc. She came home from her first day of school this year and it had not been pleasant. The school had instituted a new behavior policy which involved the students being in all day training sessions for 3 days. Therefore, there was no excitement about classes, friends, etc. Not great planning, from our perspective but we will have to be patient and wait a few days. The following week, we go to parents' night at the school where we are able to shadow our children as they attend all of their classes in an abbreviated fashion and learn about their courses. I was kind of dumbfounded to see that a particular girl, who had previously been a friend of Emmy's for many years, was in almost all of Emmy's classes. Now I realize that this should not be a big deal, but this girl had actually spewed alot of hateful comments at Emmy, mostly via internet. Emmy, being the kind of person she is, actually tried to calmly reason with this girl to no avail and we had decided that we just needed to stop communicating. What surprised me most was that Emmy had not even mentioned the fact that this girl was in all of her classes. When I mentioned it to her, she stated that she didn't think it would be a big deal. Within a couple of weeks and some more internet activity, I found myself going to the school to advise them of what was going on and asking for help. Within a day, we had Emmy's schedule discreetly adjusted and thought, phew, ok, now we can move forward.