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Why My Daughter Dropped Out of High School
And I let her
The first time Trump ran for President, I was a high school teacher and a government employee. As a recently divorced, single mother I worked constantly and lived in poverty — not surprising considering that’s how the systems of America were designed.
My daughter, Alice, was starting high school — not the one I taught at (I had a soft spot for the alternative high schools). A brilliant neurodivergent mind, my daughter had been in the gifted program from the first time she got tested in Kindergarten. Just like her mother.
She would come home and tell me about how boring all her classes were. How dense her classmates. How many times the teacher retaught the same concept in a single class. She begged me for work she could take to school to do instead; books to read in English class instead of Romeo & Juliet.
She could pass all her classes without trying. This did not make her popular. Not with the teachers whose grammar she corrected or the fellow students whose priorities she didn’t understand.
Alice would often come home and tell me about one of her friends who felt pressured to have unprotected sex to keep a boyfriend around. Or another whose boyfriend had gotten violent and she didn’t know what to do, who to talk to, how to make it stop. She…
