School, currently

My son started highschool this summer. He is 14, and is now a freshman. During the summer, the high school offered a program that consisted of part-academics and part-work. The students worked doing maintenence jobs like:
painting walls and picnic tables
planting a vegetable garden
planting an herb garden for the polytech cooking school
weeding and watering both gardens
putting a fence up around said gardens because deer were eating them
putting down mulch
scraping gum off the undersides of desks (almost vomited when I heard that one)

The students were paid minimum wage. Their aides acted as job coaches. It was a great experience, and my son loved it. He came home talking about how he loved to work. He requested more chores at home. It was a really great summer.
Now that school has started for the regular school year, it's almost all academics and no jobs. He's bummed. We're bummed. It's definitely a bummer. We must be patient. We must play our cards right. This huge high school has never really had a large or developed special education program. They've always had the monies to send disabled kids out to private settings. Now that money is tight, they need to provide programs for all these special needs students on site...and so what we're all experiencing are growing pains.
Growing pains is the term I try to use instead of crabbing and complaining about how they don't know what they're doing, they don't understand Autism, they don't have the mindset to teach our kids, they don't know how important communication with parents is, they don't get that social skills is much more than just MANNERS.....and on and on. I figure - my friends who are the parents of the other special needs kids- and I - we had a month to complain. 4 weeks to cry.
30 days to commiserate over a less-than-adequate program that we could run better with our eyes closed. OK, enough now. Venting is useful only in short bursts, and then you have to get to work. I make lists of all the positives. I look for what the teachers are doing right. I email them and thank them first, then I point out a problem or ask for a change to be made. I try and smile more, in general. Inside, I still am terrified. This terrible panicky feeling shoots through me, and I feel certain that no-one in this entire world will ever know what to do for my son, and that he will be lost without me (which is why I can never die), and I want to scream. It's really sheer panic. I never asked other parents if they feel this too, but I guess I have to live with it. I am determined to forge some kind of relationship with this school, hopefully a positive one, but that will be up to them. If they refuse to accomodate our son, by not allowing us to play a major role in developing and implementing his program, we will have to push. Hard. I'm not trying to sound dire here, just strong and direct. I have only worked in a school for 6 years, but that's long enough to see how teachers get defensive and even antagonistic when parents advocate for their kids. And that's just plain not necessary. We've really strayed very far from the 'team' concept , where we're all working towards that same goal: the child.

We need to find a way back to that place. Work together. Stop putting budgets first. Sometimes, I want to say "Remember why you became a teacher in the first place." Hopefully it was to help kids, not just because teachers get a good prescription plan.

Parents have to remind themselves of the same thing at times, right? Why did I want kids? Stop, take a look around, and appreciate where I am. I am lucky. I am blessed. I have been given far more than I deserve. Let me never forget that. In remembering this, we find reserves of patience and compassion we didn't know we had. We can forgive. We can go on, and the struggle is less bitter, and more sweet. Maybe even humorous, and memorable.