“Mommy, I love public school, but why do I feel better and more accepted in a school like this?”
I just graduated from 12th grade in Tiferes Miriam High School in Brooklyn. I live over an hour away, but ever since seventh grade, I’ve traveled back and forth to Brooklyn each day. Every day as I left home, I’d say to myself, Why? Why do I have to travel so far to get to school?
I’m a triplet. We were all born preemies, which can lead to educational delays, anxiety, and other invisible disabilities that the average person can’t understand.
Most of us with invisible disabilities started off in the regular Bais Yaakovs and chadarim and yeshivos, but the regular educational system isn’t equipped to handle us, and we can get overwhelmed by all the noise and the number of students around us. So we were placed into the hands of tutors, which then made school even worse. We were bullied because we were never in class, and we were “too slow” for our peers. Each of us with invisible disabilities has gone through some sort of bullying, some worse than others.
I myself had to battle through this until I was in fifth grade, when I was placed in a school that had smaller classes within the school. Yet this, too, still wasn’t the right fit, as I also had to be a part of the “regular” classes sometimes, which I couldn’t handle because of the huge number of girls in the class (yes, 25 can be a lot, sometimes). I also couldn’t handle the change between the “regular” class and the smaller class. It just wasn’t the right fit for me.
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