Awards for Reese

Reese was celebrated for honor roll: all A’s! What?! She worked her guts out for this, including standing up for herself in a class with a teacher who repeatedly refused to follow her 504 plan. I commend her for her grit and for refusing to be shamed when she reminded her teacher she gets extra time during testing. She was not given the accommodations in her 504 even after we went back to the vice principal regarding this class. She just studied and studied and retook tests until she got the grades she felt reflected her effort. 

As a parent, her extra effort infuriated me. I want her to be a kid. 

But I’m also so dang proud of her for realizing something was not going to go the way it should, abd gor jusy working harder.  Reese exhibits meekness and her countenance shines because of it. The consequence to this divine characteristic is that I worry she will be taken advantage of and her gentle spirit be abused as a weaknesss. I don’t like seeing her get walked on.  Reese learned to be her own advocate, this year. I backed her up in a couple of situations that required a mother bear (like when a little punk was sexually harassing her with photographs he took of her, altered with inappropriate images, and then redistributed), But SHE learned to speak up and tell me when things were not right. To tell the vice principal, and her teacher when her rights as a student were violated. One if my favorite lines from her this year was, “so we have to spend all this time memorizing facts and writing papers about the wage gap and gender inequality, and then I tell this teacher that he isn’t respecting my 504, and he rolls his eyes at me and tells me I don’t need the study guide or to have the test read to me, or time abd a half, because I’ll do well enough if I study hard. And the articles he’s making me read are all about how women who work as hard as men aren’t being treated equally.  Why waste all this time forcing us to “understand inequality” if he only cares about one example of it?  I’m working harder than other students just to read the class material. Ironic?”  

Ba-BAM. This kid studied gender inequality all year long as course curriculum, while her learning disability was ignored. She could have gotten an F in that class and I would have stood to applaud her, because I know how much time she put in studying and retaking tests and rewriting essay question answers. Her teacher declined an invitation to the 504 meeting and I will decline having another Willardson be enrolled in this class. Thank goodness for you, Reese. You’re a guinea pig for your siblings and you pave a path of peace and dignity. She would be bold and tell me things that were  not happening (that should be), but never whined or complained about the injustice. I would have justified her tears, but instead, she just got tougher. Some might look at the situation and decide the system won, but we decided that the way she handled her load this year proves that Reese wins. 

Reese received awards for outstanding effort in English (her favorite class) and in Science, this year. She also got an award for doing the most Dreambox lessons in her Math class. Reese’s Math and English teachers this year were phenomenal. So thankful for them and for helping her to love school, and for the encouragement and support they gave to Reese to shoot for academic excellence. 

Here she is with her friend, Simon, who received the Wildcat award for good character.