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My daughter was in and out of homeschool and various school alternatives for about the last six years of her school career, and it was usually over excessive unreasonable discipline in her case as well.

She tried going back to regular school in seventh grade. She'd been out of public school for long enough that they gave her placement tests to see what level classes to put her in and she did above average in all areas and aced about half of them. So then she goes to the school and every day they have to get each teacher to sign some log they have to certify they at least tried each problem on the homework. If not, they got detention. Often the teacher was so busy, it was difficult to get her to sign. If it was forgotten or she never had time during the class, detention. They had to grade each others papers and if they used the wrong color pen, detention.

It was like they were TRYING to frustrate the kids, especially the intelligent creative ones. I'm sure they would discipline a kid that stood up and called the teacher a "MFing whore bitch" or something, but I'm sure the punishment would have been...detention. So the upshot is that the school is saying that kind of blatant anti-social disrespectful outburst is morally equivalent to grading in the wrong color pen or having a teacher too busy to sign your book. Morons. She never went back to conventional public school.

I grew up in a small rural farming town.... with a ridiculously liberal and intolerant public school. Well, a friend of mine came from a lower-income family; subsistence farming was a necesity that made ends meet. Well, he would buy a nice pair of jeans and wear them until they looked "worn." Then, he would wear them on the farm. Well, graduation day, my friend is standing there, wearing his full length blue robe; the first male in his family to graduate from high school..... and one of our lovely administrators told him he wasn't allowed to wear jeans under the robe (because you could just definitely tell /sarc). Any other pair of pants, but not jeans. Or, he couldn't walk. When he explained all he had were jeans, they didn't have money for clothes they didn't wear, he was told he couldn't participate (we weren't the same size). Then the "administrator derided him for not having pants that weren't jeans.

He drove his mother's truck home; found an old ratty pair of hand-me-down turquois courdoroy pants and had to run to catch up to the rest of the grads already marching to the field. And they still tried to stop him from participating.... "because he was late!!!"

It does sound like they were trying to frustrate your daughter and the other students. Good thing you decided to homeschool again. :-)

I know a woman whose shy, quiet daughter was assaulted in middle school by another student (a boy). She never saw it coming; he attacked her from behind. When asked why, he said he “just felt like it.” The principal didn’t want to involve the police, so the parents called the police. One of the parents worked at the school, and the principal was mad at them for calling the police. It was crazy. If anyone should be punished, a student who assaults another that way should be punished. I don’t know if the boy ever was disciplined.

When they pulled their daughter out to homeschool, the teachers were mad at them. Go figure. The mother came to our homeschool meetings and, of course, there were a bunch of us there who’d had bad experiences with schools. ;-) There also were some former teachers homeschooling their own children. One woman’s son was ill and had learning disabilities, and he’d been assaulted at school again and again. The kids assaulting other kids are the ones who need punishment. Not the kids using the wrong color pens or whose teachers were too busy to sign their work!