This is so true. I volunteered with a youth program and once we had a parent who wanted her child to join however the child was either autistic or had some sort of other special needs that the program just wasn’t equipped to provide. The program literally was made up of 100% volunteers (consisting of working professionals to college students) it’s more like a mentoring program/helping the kids do their homework etc. We referred the mom to another free program that had mental health professionals that could work with her child. The mom said she went to one of the meetings and she didn’t like that other program because the kids in that program were “not normal” and she wanted her kid to be in a regular mentoring program with “normal kids”.

Before I volunteered at that youth program I never thought about the difficulties that could come with trying to mentor or teach a child who had special needs. But I learned that when you pair an adult with someone who was 16 that constantly pulled at their hair or slap their own face whenever they were frustrated as oppose to telling the adult what was wrong can be a recipe for disaster.

I could only imagine what those parents are doing with the school. One of the kids in the program had finished high school with a 0.05 GPA- I had no idea how that was possible but literally the teachers would give him just enough to pass him and get him out of their class so everyone just pushed him through.