Gardening (and life pro) Tip: To encourage healthy growth, sometimes you must lift the manure from the tender shoot struggling into daylight.

I feel pretty wrung-out after more than a year of wrangling with inflexible, institutionalized-bullying systems and some of their minions. We have wonderful supporters within those systems. The fact is we advocate and advocate for physical and mental illness and we get such a subjective, varied response that once again we are made aware of how vulnerable all but the "strong" are in the schools. And rather than making right the wrongs that have been incurred around these issues, we are dogged for notes, notes and more notes and reminded incessantly by letter and robo calls from the high school that we need to improve attendance. Sigh. You know, the thought had never occurred, we haven't seen our daughter struggling to go to school despite great  intellectual potential and thought to discuss the issue with her. The form letters and daily form call, one size fits all, just hurts the families of ill teens and children - keeps those wounds open as their peers and friends carry forward in the usual way. I am pretty sure we can do better than this, particularly if the statistics are accurate and 20% of us are mentally ill (all Canadians have been touched by it through family, etc.) or another percentage of us have a chronic illness, etc.

• It is estimated that 10-20% of Canadian youth are affected by a mental illness or disorder – the single most disabling group of disorders worldwide. (www.cmha.ca › Media)

On the one hand we provide a doctor's note (immediately upon request) that indicates illness and after prompt submission we receive a terse reply from one official stating that as the note did not indicate an inability to do the class work, so we must set up a schedule, blah, blah, blah, the note fairly screamed. I am so pissed off at this point my hyperbole is creeping back in. Then we receive a form letter from a teacher that is so cold, I need to use tongs to hold it - just an impersonal reminder to improve attendance, no mention of project-based work that could supplement the final exam as her other teacher provided without hesitation. My daughter is an A plus student and even if a student's marks were poor, she/he deserves more consideration than a rude form that does not acknowledge the illness. We can and should do better to honour sick students.

We are considering home schooling our son until September - not because that is what we absolutely think that is what we want or our son should have at this point - but because the UGDSB is so concerned about attendance issues despite mitigating circumstances, that if my son is home for health reasons, "THEY" are likely to show up at our door in SWAT uniforms and stick us in prison for life without parole because they lost the note that we provided in triplicate on yellow paper (not kidding, one of the forms "must" be printed on yellow paper) or because someone just didn't like the cut of our jib. Subjectivity is not an equitable premise from which to treat students and their families - one principal or school should not be a haven from the others. There is an underground subculture that naturally responds to oppression (inflexibility that does not reflect the natural course of real life results in pockets of humanity that fills the void) - and we are finding it in regard to mental illness and juvenile diabetes. Think how challenging it must be for the ones who don't have the resources to find the underground railroad for the archaic UGDSB protocol refugees.

Our son's principal "gets us" and all of the people who, like us, don't fit that one idealized student model that the system seems to be based upon. In choosing home schooling, if we go that route, we are insulated from insensitive, and frankly, actionable behaviour at the hands of some employees of the school board while we teach our son from home when he is feeling well and let him recover when he is ill. This will be a respite from the pressure - letting the seams out as it were, because until there is a cure for Type 1 diabetes or depression, we remain flexible while others are not.