oh BOY we're having THIS trigger again.

Thank you, Richmond County public school system.

@Leucrotta Ooof - school trauma. That sounds rough, friend. 🫂♥️🥺

@GoodNewsGreyShoes I'm still uncomfortable sharing space with developmentally disabled folks because the county's response to needing a gifted program was bussing the gifted kids to the same school where they dumped any special needs program. And like everything else in that program, I was a genius, I was supposed to be able to handle that GREAT automatically.

@Leucrotta Did you get tossed into your school's special needs program?? Wtf?? 👀

@GoodNewsGreyShoes County's. They put everyone in the same place - developmentally disabled, gifted classes, any blind/deaf/mobility impaired kids. This is the same gifted program which convinced me I could never be a programmer.

@Leucrotta Whaaaaat the heeeeellllllll....

That's several shades of fucked up (tho I suppose I could say that about the entirety of the American / Canadian education system 🤔

@Leucrotta How did you get thru? (If you don't mind me asking)

@GoodNewsGreyShoes I didn't, really. I was bussed to these gifted classes for two years before my Dad got transferred to Ft. McPherson, and Dekalb County is huge so the high school I went to had its own gifted program.

@Leucrotta ...where you didn't have to be in the same group/program as students with developmental disabilities? 🤔 How was that for you?

@GoodNewsGreyShoes The grade school classes separated us all out by class when we weren't at lunchtime or w/e, but they were pretty crap gifted classes anyway, I remember about four things from them and NONE of those are good. Also with being bussed to a different school some of the week, it meant I fit in at my normal school less. High school gifted classes by comparison didn't really take me out of the normal flow of the high school, which had its own dire bullshit.

@Leucrotta Huh. Looking back on it, would you have preferred to be in the 'normal' student group the whole time instead? Or were there parts of that situation you're glad you missed?

@GoodNewsGreyShoes Hard to say. My grade school was crap, but it wouldn't have gotten me labeled as weird the same way (and of course, I wouldn't have had the terrible crap from the gifted classes). Now I'm not sure whether it was grades 4-5 or just grade 5, because that's how much memory loss was involved.

@Leucrotta But the high school was different?

@GoodNewsGreyShoes High school was terrible in a lot of ways, but different from grade school. Gifted classes were one of the more benign things about *that* crummy situation.