Hi all, I’d like to say I’m usually not a parent who rocks up to the school telling the teacher what to do. However, I feel like maybe in this case I will have to.
basically dd 9 is in a class which is pretty challenging in general. There’s a few children with behavioural needs and some with SEN - including my daughter who has Sen herself. They seem to change their seating arrangements every couple months.
anyway, dd used to have a friend who she was pretty close to although I always thought said friend was pretty toxic but when younger a lot went over DD’s head. She would say nasty things and not let dd play with others. I believe she prayed on dd’s vulnerabilities and dd didn’t see the bad in said friend at the time. That was until last year when it all went too far and dd started noticing more and more. Her friend started nit picking about everything with dd, my usually happy confident child was a shell of herself coming home sobbing for hours, she was being bullied. She was being bullied by said friend but it wasn’t the usual stuff, it was more subtle and it was happening outside of school too - they live around the corner. Her ‘friend’ would make fun of her constantly. I won’t go into detail but it was bad. She would also steal DD’s stuff.
dd herself is such a lovely, kind girl, I’m not just saying that because she’s mine but she won an award for her kindness last year, an award only one child in the school receive each year. She’s a great kid, she has her struggles academically and other things but generally she loved school but after the bullying got bad from this one girl she started hating going.
I know the mum but I kept it mostly within school with the teacher who wasn’t very helpful but he encouraged dd to pursue new friendships and she’s got close to a few girls in her class which is great and they regularly have play dates and she’s been a lot happier the last month or so but she’s recently had a MH assessment due to high anxiety levels and a lot of the anxiety comes down to the bully child/ex friend which was picked up on by the lady doing the assessment. the only time I spoke to the mum about is when she approached me saying how her dd is upset as my dd won’t speak to hers anymore - I said you need to speak to your daughter and ask her why that is and left it to that.
anyway, their teacher has sat them together in class and I’m not happy. I mean he knows the girl is a bully so why?! I know someone has to sit next to her however I think she makes a beeline for dd to bully rather than anyone else.
the girl is kicking dd under the table on purpose and distracting dd. Dd is a compliant girl at school and has never had to stay in at break until she’s been sat down next to this girl. I think she’s becoming frustrated and distracted and not getting any work done (she needs help academically as she’s dyslexic and has learning & speech delays). She says the girl purposely flings her hair into her knowing she doesn’t like it (dd has sensory needs), she takes her stuff and chucks it and just nitpicks at dd constantly and makes fun that dd often needs support from a TA and told dd ‘she can’t read properly’. Dd said she picked up the girls pencil for her and she got kicked. She’s also very loud and shouts in her ear. I mean why isn’t the teacher seeing this?! She’s also commented on DD’s appearance a few times. Dd is beautiful, she’s a red head like me and gets called ginger amongst other things like a scar dd has etc.
anyway, sorry this is long. I wanted to moan. This is just a small part of it. It would be too long to talk about everything that’s happened. I’ve kept a log of all incidents though.
shall I demand they are separated? I don’t think the girl is like this with others or maybe she is 🤷♀️