Apologies in advance for how long this will be but I hope someone has a bit of advice.
We have 3 dc's aged 7,4,3. Ds1 has been attending a private nursery/school since he was 12 months old when dd1 & dd2 were born we moved house to a nice little village with decent school knowing that we couldn't afford private education for the three of them. When ds1 was 5 we tried to move him to the village school and he struggled to fit in he was having panic attacks developed a nervous twitch would lay in bed crying all the time. We stuck at this for a couple of months but he got worse and worse so we decided to put him back into the independent school he had been in before, and keep the dd's at the village nursery.
This worked fine for a while, I was chair of the PTA at ds's school and I was approached by the Chair trustee of the school and was asked to become part of the board of trustees (I knew at the time that they only had a board of 2 people and legally they needed 4). I agreed to do this and the chair asked me why we had only one of our children in the school not all three. I explained to him that finically we couldn't afford the school fees for more than one child and that our eldest was settled here and had struggled to change school hence why we had kept him there. The chair then took me and my dp to one side and told us it would not look great for the school if one of the board didn't have all the children attending the school and that we should move our girls to the school nursery and when the time came for them to go to full school he would 'sort us out' with a bursary/scholarship that would equate to us paying no more that 1 full fee.
We agreed to do this and moved the girls and I started the process of becoming a trustee, whilst I was doing this the school got a new head teacher who put out an advert in the newspaper asking for people to become trustees. The school then had about 8-9 people call in interested in taking up the positions. They all seemed to join the board in about a week and my application wasn't processed for some reason. I was then told that they didn't need anymore trustees and I should just stay as chair of the PTA. I was fine with this and when I saw the chair trustee I asked him if the girls were still going to be able to go through the school to which he said that our son would get a scholarship and our dd1 would get a bursary and that we should keep them there.
DD1 was in the nursery when the children went back after the summer holidays (last year) and the reception teacher had said to us that they could move her up into reception class a year early (she missed reception start date by 2 days) We sent her to reception to see how she got on and was very happy to be there so she was moved into this class. We sent an email to the chair and the receptionist about the bursary starting as the school had moved her up early. They said they would get the forms ready for us to fill out, we got the forms a month later, filled them out and returned them. When we returned them we were two months into the term. We were then sent an email saying our bursary decision wouldn't be considered until we had paid the full 2 months and the month that we were in for both children. We had already paid ds' but without some kind of bursary we had no way of paying both in full.
We kept up payments on ds' and the tiny bit we could afford to put towards dd's fees but no matter how many times we tried to explain to the chair/head/receptionist no one would come up with any other way to get the bursary in place unless we paid the debt (which was constantly increasing) in full. This went on for another 7 months when I went in to speak to the head (for the 100th time) he said to me 'oh don't worry about it we are not going to chase you for it not until the children have finished school!' When I calculated this up they were willing to let us get into over £60,000 worth of debt by the time ds left the school. I then sent an email to the chair (who had ignored me for the last 6 months) saying I felt it was very irresponsible of him to let a young family get into this level of debt without coming to some sort of agreement seeing as he had suggested we move the children knowing full well we didn't have the money to keep them there. He responded the same afternoon when I went to get the children the head had a letter for me. I opened it when I got in the car and it was from the chair saying 'I received you email and yes that was a very irresponsible thing for us to do so I have decided it would be for the best if you contract with the school was terminated so tomorrow will be the last day your children spend at our school.' This was a week before the may half term. So I was left with all three at home, I had to quit my job to keep them at home Ds has been a wreck since he left he had had the same routine since he was 12 months old and his teacher had him on a special plan to keep him doing tasks all day as he can get disruptive when left to his own devices (the doctors had been into school when he was 6 to observe him as the school though he had add but we were told by the doctors he was just very bright and needed to be kept busy) he has been fighting with our dd's constantly. I have really been finding it hard to cope with him he is a different child to who he was before.
Just to make it even worse it took us until the last 2 week of term before we found him a school to go to and since he started he got told off everyday. The group of mums won't speak to me and one of them stopped me on the drive and really bitchily said to me 'did you send your children to a private school because you think your better than us?!'. Ds has said that the boys keep wanting to fight him and that they won't sit near him in class. I just don't know what to do.