On to Plan B for D
As you know we have tried to send the kids back to public school this school year. I did this for various reasons including socialization and the fact that the kids wanted to go back to school. Unfortunately it is not working out like we had hoped.
As of this past Wednesday, Dustin is now being home schooled full time again. We had an incident on Tuesday at school. He had left again. This made it the 5th time he has done this since school started. We had met the week prior to put in place a safety plan for him. It didn’t get executed during our last wandering off incident.
Tuesday Oct. 18, 2011: Dustin didn’t fight me to go to school. He had left school the day before saying he did not feel well. He was grumpy when I dropped him off but did walk into the school and sat in his chair. I left, went home, and proceeded to get John ready for school. John and I left home and headed for John’s school. As we were approaching the school I got a phone call. Dustin was leaving the school again. I was about 15 minutes away and needed to get John inside so I could be free to go look for Dustin without John melting down. I called Dustin’s dad and had him run up to the school area to look for Dustin. When I left John’s school I proceeded to head that way, and used my cell phone to call Dustin’s phone, but he didn’t answer.
When I got to the area of the school, I ran into Craig, Dustin’s dad. Dustin wasn’t with him, he was still looking for him. At that point I had Craig head north of the school and comb that area, while I went south of the school and looked there. In the mean time I called the school again to find out which direction he was heading when he left. He went south they told me, and in the past he always headed north.
During all this I am still trying to get ahold of Dustin on his cell phone with no luck. So I went south of the school and combed that neighborhood. No sign of him. Finally Dustin answered his phone. I asked him where he was at so I could pick him up, and he didn’t know. I then had to talk him through reading street signs to figure out where he was at. He walked to the first sign and read it. He couldn’t read it right so I had him spell it. I was on that same street. Then I had him try to tell me the cross street. He couldn’t figure out that street name correctly, but then he recognized the area he was in. He told me he was by a gas station. I told him to go there and wait for me. There were three gas stations in that area that were the same corporation. So I hit the first one that was on the street he told me he was on, and there he was.
Dustin was gone for about 45 minutes. A very scary ordeal. I was sick to my stomach once I got him home and settled, and started thinking about what just happened. I thank GOD he had his cell phone with him and answered it. At that point in time I decided that we were done, I was going to pull him out of his dual enrollment at public school. I am now home schooling him full time again, and I may very well continue to do this the rest of his academic career. Dustin was doing so well in the beginning. We don’t know what went wrong. We were trying to figure that out and modify his schedule for him, but safety became the main issue that needed to be addressed first and foremost. So here we are.
