Sample Letter Of Complaint To School Principal: Fill & Download for Free

A complaint letter to the principal of a school may be sent by a student, parent of a student or a teacher employed in the school. Most states encourage the student, parent or teacher to first explain their problem to their principal in person before sending a formal complaint letter.​If this doesn’t have the required effect, they should send a letter formally expressing their complaint, with details, and giving a recommendation for a satisfactory resolution.The principal may attend to complaints, but cannot legally tell others about the steps they have taken. It may be enough for the complainant to know that the issue is being attended to, but if things don’t get better, they may want to consider sending a complaint letter to the superintendent of the school district or the school board.Before taking further steps, the parent or student should call the principal about a week after they have received the letter to learn if any measures are being taken.Sample Letter to a PrincipalDear Principal,My daughter, Cal, who is in 8th grade mentioned to me that the dance tomorrow night has an Hawaiian Luau theme and that there is a reduced entry fee incentive to wear a costume. Without knowing more than that, I feel compelled to write to find out more and with some concerns that this raises for me.I believe that, as a nation, we do a rather inadequate job learning about indigenous/native cultures, so when the exposure to one of those cultures is less an opportunity for learning and more about adapting it for our entertainment, I believe as educators we send a wrong message. The harm of one small dance organized by students who may mean no harm on its own arguably is negligible -- but when it is part of a pattern of a society's cumulative disregard for inclusion, I find it more problematic, and therein lie my concerns. Since [school name] has diversity as one of its guiding principles (indeed one of the reasons we chose to have our daughter attend,) I hope that you will share my concerns.I am hoping that if the dance does indeed have the theme, that it might be followed with a school-wide initiative to know more about native Hawaiian cultures that involves a more comprehensive look. I am happy to help in that endeavor and offer these thoughts with a generous spirit.Sincerely,Cal’s Mom(home 222-222-2222)

The accusation that Wakefield’s research is fraudulent is in regard to a single 1998 Lancet Publication he co-authored, titled: “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children”. The focus of that study was gastrointestinal dysfunction in children with autism, not vaccines and autism. The Lancet paper states:“We identified associated gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of previously normal children, which was generally associated in time with possible environmental triggers… Onset of behavioural symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination in eight of the 12 children, with measles infection in one child, and otitis media in another.”“We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described. Virological studies are underway that may help to resolve this issue…We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunization. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and its possible relation to this vaccine.” An addendum states: “Up to Jan 28, a further 40 patients have been assessed; 39 with the syndrome.” -https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673697110960/fulltextIn 2003, a freelance journalist by the name of Brian Deer accepted an assignment for the Sunday Times, having been hired by Paul Nuki who stated “I need something big on MMR” as “litigation was pending in the High Court over alleged damage to children from the MMR vaccine.” Subsequently Deer consulted MLI (Medico-Legal Investigations, a firm that provides “a confidential service for the pharmaceutical industry and health sectors”. -MLI ) who assisted him “in strictest confidence -MLI” to craft the allegations. Between 2006 and it’s demise in 2013, MLI was funded entirely by the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries (ABPI), acting as its “police force”. According to MLI’s chairman, 26 of the 27 doctors against who MLI initiated GMC proceedings, were found guilty of “research related matters.” MLI worked closely with “health authorities.” Among its services to Pharma clients was designing complaints to initiate GMC investigations. MLI served as:“Liaison between GMC and complainants during the build-up to the disciplinary hearing; Completion of case and final preparation for hearing under the auspices of the solicitors acting for the prosecution…” -MLIOn February 25, 2004 Deer solely filed a formal complaint against 3 of the 13 study authors (Andrew Wakefield, John Walker-Smith, and Simon Murch) with the GMC fitness to practice panel, stating:“I write to ask your permission to lay before you an outline of evidence that you may consider worthy of evaluation with respect of the possibility of serious professional misconduct on the part of the above named registered medical practitioners.” -Brian DeerThe GMC case against Dr. Wakefield and his two co-defendants on behalf of Brian Deer, alleged that vulnerable children were subject to research under the guise of clinical care. When the GMC case was subjected to genuine judicial review in 2012 at the appeal of Dr. Walker-Smith, the GMC allegations collapsed. After a thorough assessment of all the evidence and testimonies, the High Court determined that there was no evidence to support the allegations. The significant GMC determinations against the study were overturned. The GMC had the opportunity, but chose not to appeal the severe censure by the High Court. The attorney representing the GMC acknowledged that GMC had no additional evidence to substantiate its guilty verdicts. The High Court decision, therefore, became irrevocable. Despite adjudication of the GMC principal allegations against the infamous Lancet Study, the case continues to be mis-portrayed to the public as a valid GMC verdict.The GMC case was built on a central false premise; namely, that the Lancet clinical observation study, was commissioned by the Dawbarns law firm, paid for by the Legal Aid Board (LAB), and conducted under Project 172-96, to support a lawsuit. The GMC panel conflated two different studies. The study (project 172-96) that Dr. Wakefield, Dr. Murch, and Professor Walker-Smith were accused of performing had been approved, and was slated to be conducted AFTER the (Lancet) pilot study. However, as was adjudicated by the High Court, the Lancet observational case series was NOT Project 172-96:The key allegations & GMC fitness to practice panels’ determinations followed by the 2012 High Court adjudication are as follows:(1) “The children described in the Lancet paper were admitted for research purposes under Project 172-96; the purpose of the project was to investigate the postulated new syndrome following vaccination. The Lancet paper failed to state that this was the case, and the Panel concluded that this was dishonest, intentional and irresponsible.” -GMC“The Panel has heard that ethical approval had been sought and granted for other trials and it has been specifically suggested that Project 172-96 was never undertaken and that in fact, the Lancet 12 children’s investigations were clinically indicated and the research parts of those clinically justified investigations were covered by Project 162-95. In the light of all the available evidence, the Panel rejected this proposition.” -GMC“Serious professional misconduct [alleged by GMC] in relation to the Lancet children was in part founded upon its [GMC] conclusion that the investigations into them were carried out pursuant to Project 172- 96. The only explanation given for that conclusion is that it was reached ‘in the light of all the available evidence’, that was an inadequate explanation.” -Justice Mitting.“None of the five clinicians involved in the investigation of the Lancet children who gave evidence to the panel considered that they were following Project 172-96. None of the children fitted the hypothesis to be tested under Project 172-96,” -Justice Mitting“None of the children fitted the hypothesis to be tested under Project 172-96, in that none of them had both received a single or double vaccine. Project 172-96 was never undertaken.” -Justice Mitting(2) Children were subjected to invasive tests “that were not clinically indicated” – e.g., spinal taps and endoscopic procedures such as colonoscopies and biopsies – for research purposes under 172-96. -GMC“Project 172-96 was never undertaken and that in fact, the Lancet twelve children's investigations [including procedures] were clinically indicated and the research parts [directed by Wakefield] of those clinically justified investigations were covered by Project 162-95 [the general permission given to Professor Walker-Smith in September 1995].” -Justice Mitting“As Miss Glynn [from GMC] concedes, the reasons for the panel’s findings that colonoscopy, barium meal and follow through and lumbar puncture were not clinically indicated are wrong,” and “the finding that a lumbar puncture was not clinically indicated was not open to the panel and was wrong”. -Justice Mitting.(3) The study lacked ethics committee approval. -GMC“It was a clinically driven investigation which did not require Ethics Committee approval,” -Justice Mitting(4) “Some [4] of the children were not routine referrals to the gastroenterology department, in that they lacked a history of reported gastrointestinal symptoms and had been referred for investigation of the role played by the measles vaccination or the MMR vaccination in their developmental disorders.” -GMC“The [GMC] findings that the referrals of four children were not routine because the referring doctors did not mention intestinal symptoms in their referral letters was factually accurate as to the contents of the referral letters, but of no significance. In each case, Professor Walker-Smith elicited gastrointestinal symptoms at his outpatients clinic. The finding that all four children “lacked a history of gastrointestinal symptoms” is wrong unless the panel intended only to refer to the contents of the referral letters. -Justice Mitting“The panel’s finding that the description of the patient population [histories] in the Lancet paper was misleading would only have been justified if its primary finding that all of the Lancet children were referred for the purposes of research as part of Project 172-96 is sustainable. Because, for the reasons which I have given, it was not, this aspect of its findings must also fall.” -Justice Mitting.“In every case investigations were followed by a discharge letter prepared by Dr. Casson which set out a diagnosis of the child's condition and by a recommendation for treatment”. “The discharge notes were appropriately amended.” -Justice Mitting.(5) The description of the children’s diagnosis in the Lancet paper and the description of the referral process as “consecutively referred” was “inaccurate,” and “irresponsible”. -GMC“This [Lancet] paper does not bear the meaning put upon it by the panel. The phrase “consecutively referred” means no more than that the children were referred successively [to the Department of Paediatric Gastroenterology], rather than as a single batch. The words did not imply routine referral.” -Justice Mitting“It [GMC] put its stretched meaning of the wording of part of the paper into his mouth and then found [entered a decision against him] that it was irresponsible and misleading. This was not a legitimate finding.” -Justice Mitting.(6) [Wakefield Caused] “blood to be taken from a group of children for research purposes at a birthday party, which the Panel found to be an inappropriate social setting. He behaved unethically in failing to seek Ethics Committee approval; he showed callous disregard for any distress or pain the children might suffer, and he paid the children £5 reward for giving their blood.” -GMCOne blood sample each was taken from these developmentally normal, healthy children for research purposes, to serve as controls, for comparison with autistic children with bowel disease. Each of the parents had been contacted prior to the party; they were fully informed, and each gave permission (some of the parents were medical doctors). The blood was taken by a qualified, experienced medical professional, not Dr. Wakefield; the equipment used was appropriate, sterile and the type commonly used.As for Dr. Wakefield’s failure to obtain approval from the Research Ethics Committee (REC) for the taking of blood from these children: first, according to the National Research Ethics Service, “Not all research conducted within the UK requires approval from an NHS REC”. Dr. Wakefield testified that it was his “understanding at that time was that such approval was not necessary unless the subjects of the research were National Health Service patients.”(7) “Dr. Wakefield accepted monies totaling £50,000 procured through Mr Barr, the Claimants’ solicitor to pursue research under Project 172-96.”The sworn testimony of Mr. Martin Else, Head of the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust, confirms that the £50,000 from the Legal Aid Board was held in a separate Special Trustees account (account G106). The money was not paid to Dr. Wakefield; it was first submitted to the UCL medical school, and then transferred by Dean Ari Zuckerman to the Special Trustees account. It was not used until the Lancet study had been completed. The Royal Hospital General Trust fund paid the salary of a lab technician during the 2 years in which the Lancet study was conducted (1996-1998). The technician was not paid with the money provided by Legal Aid Board.(8) “Dr. Wakefield failed to disclose to the Editor of the Lancet his involvement as the inventor of a patent relating to a new vaccine for the elimination of the measles virus (Transfer Factor) which he claimed in the patent application, would be a treatment for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). He did not accept that the invention was envisaged as an alternative vaccine to MMR…He acknowledged that he had envisaged the use of transfer factor for at least a proportion of the population, and that he had a financial and career interest in its success, but he insisted that there was a reasonable argument for non-disclosure. The Panel considered that his actions and his persistent lack of insight as to the gravity of his conduct amounted to serious professional misconduct.” -GMCDr. Wakefield suggested to the administrators that the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine could generate capital by developing biotechnology patents. This patent was submitted in collaboration with the Royal Free. Patent law requires strict confidentiality: any disclosure of information related to a patent will result in loss of legal protection for the patent. The patent for “Transfer Factor” was NOT for a competing measles vaccine; transfer factor cannot stimulate the production of protective measles antibodies. The patent was for a proposed antidote treatment against adverse reactions to the vaccine. However, it was not tested nor developed.(9) “Dr. Wakefield failed to disclose to the Ethics Committee and to the Editor of the Lancet his involvement in the MMR litigation.” -GMCKnowledge about his work in preparation for a class action lawsuit by the UK government sponsored Legal Aid Board, was known to his co-authors, to administrators of the Royal Hospital, and to Dr. Richard Horton editor-in-chief of the Lancet. Justice Mitting quotes from a letter dated November 6, 1996, written by Dr. Wakefield to Professor Walker-Smith about “the legal aspect of these cases and the litigation being proposed by Dawbarns”. As noted above, Dr. Horton was well aware of the planned litigation as proven by his correspondence in 1997 with the attorney who was slated to file the lawsuit. Furthermore, the lawsuit was the subject of an article in The Independent as early as Nov. 27, 1996.The High Court ruled in regard to the GMC’s case against the authors; “there was distortion of evidence, inadequate analysis, inadequate and superficial reasoning and explanation, inappropriate rejection of evidence, ‘flawed’ and ‘wrong’ reasoning, and ‘numerous and significant universal inadequacies’…. Fundamental errors…that go to the heart of the case. They are not curable. The panel’s determination cannot stand.”-Justice Mitting.“Both on general issues and the Lancet paper and in relation to individual children, the panel's overall conclusion of serious professional misconduct was flawed…[there was] inadequate and superficial reasoning and, in a number of instances, a wrong conclusion… the medical records provide an equivocal answer to most of the questions which the panel had to decide”. “The panel’s determination cannot stand. I therefore quash it.” -Justice Mitting. (March 7, 2012).“Mr Justice Mitting called for changes in the way General Medical Council fitness to practise panel hearings are conducted in the future saying: "It would be a misfortune if this were to happen again." -BBC News http://www.bbc.com/news/health-17283751The High Court records quoted above were found at the British and Irish legal information institute: http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2012/503.html&query=Walker-Smith+and+GMC&method=booleanSome have been critical of the study for failing to conform to the scientific standards of a controlled clinical trial. But the authors never claimed it was a randomized clinical trial; it was a case series; “It wasn’t supposed to be “a scientific sample” or a statistical measure of anything.” - Dr. Walker-SmithOthers have criticized Dr. Wakefield for “making inductive statements on the basis of 12 cases.” Viewed from a non-contentious historical perspective, this study is an example of how scientists identify a new condition based on a small number of patients. For example, Dr. Leo Kanner was the first scientist to identify the condition of “early infantile autism” in 1943. The basis for this identification was his case series involving 11 children. And Dr. Hans Asperger’s paper (1944) described 4 cases of “autistic psychopathy” which laid the foundation for the recognition of Asperger’s syndrome. These small studies are considered seminal works. More recently, a paper in a journal published by the BMJ Group (2004) described findings of cerebral changes in 9 infants who underwent diffusion tensor imaging.In any regard, The Lancet 12 study was ultimately correct in its findings of an association between gastrointestinal dysfunction in children with autism. It is now well documented that GI problems are often a co-morbid condition in these children. Unfortunately, the Lancets retraction of “Wakefield’s” study has created serious implications in the medical profession and has come at a significant cost to children with autism. For more than two decades these children have not been able to receive care for their co-morbid GI conditions, pediatric physicians are not willing to diagnose GI dysfunction in these patients due to the stigma associated with the Lancet study, these children have been neglected by a paralyzed medical profession, and left to suffer without warrant from untreated and debilitating GI symptoms indefinitely.

This is one of the most personal questions I’ve answered on Quora, even more than the one about my cancer treatment.Tl:dr version: Do NOT assume that a private school is better than public. Just as there are excellent and awful public schools, there are excellent and awful private schools. And not only are the awful ones awful, but they are not accountable to anyone, so you don’t even have a schoolbord or local elected officials you can complain to about the awful experience you had with the awful private school. And on top of that, you paid through the nose to have that awful experience!I went to both public and private schools, and so did my daughter. Our experiences were many ways mirror opposites.I went to public schools through the 9th grade. Very average school system for 1st grade, then to a small town for 2nd grade through most of 4th. In that town (Clarion PA) there was a state teachers college, so the first school I went to, for 2nd grade, had a big advantage because it was next to the college and we had tons of student teachers and their professors practicing on us, giving us lots of attention and all the latest educational methods. Then that school closed and merged into the main elementary school, which was not so leading-edge (that’s the school I wrote about in another answer, about their policy of paddling children), but I still had a good experience there because of being labeled gifted, so my teachers would give me lots of fun special projects to keep me from getting bored. Then near the end of 4th grade we moved out of state, and ended up in a really excellent public school system, where I stayed through 9th grade.I had positive experiences at all the public schools I attended, even the ones which on paper might not be considered top schools. Again, this was mostly because I was a gifted student who loved school, and teachers got very excited to encounter a student eager to suck up as much learning as they could send my way.I am emphasizing that point because there is a certain type of parent — a stereotype, but one that often holds true — parents whose children are performing poorly in school, even disruptive, and the parents claim the problem is the child is actually TOO bright and is acting out because he/she is bored — i.e., the parents claim it is the school’s fault for not engaging the child. I have a LOT of friends in the teaching profession, and they overwhelmingly assert that it is almost never the case that the child is actually too bright and acting out due to boredom — what IS the case is that the parents are in denial that any of the problem could be the child’s fault or the parents’ fault.Before a lot of people pipe up that it really did happen to them just that way, please note that I said it was “almost never” the case, so I am willing to grant you may be one of the few exceptions. I simply ask that you also grant that my own experience was valid: that in various grades, with various teachers in multiple school districts, no teacher I encountered neglected my gifts or allowed me to be bored, but was always excited to have met a gifted pupil and give me extra projects, even though this meant extra work for the teacher. And all this was in public schools.I applied for a scholarship program which led to me going to a top boarding school for 10th through 12th grade (Phillips Exeter Academy). One thing I found in my very first semester there was that, even though I’d come from a public school background, I was as well prepared for my new, more challenging school as the kids who’d gone to expensive private schools their whole lives. However, I must concede that I did witness some classmates who had a harder time hitting the ground running, and though I did not do any scientific sampling, I admit it’s probable that the kids who struggled when they first got there were more likely to have come out of public schools. But eventually they caught up.As much as I liked all the public schools I had attended, my experience at Exeter blew them all away. I constantly shake my head at the way movies & tv depict all boarding schools as horrid places that mean parents send their kids as punishment, because my experience was closer to the way Harry Potter felt: how lucky he felt to find himself at Hogwarts, and how he couldn’t wait to get back to Hogwarts at the end of each summer. My family hadn’t mistreated me or made me sleep in a cupboard, but I couldn’t wait to go to my boarding school after every break.Yes, a big part of it was that the academics were outstanding. They dumped so much homework on us, but it made us feel so grown up, to be learning things at a college level, etc.But the best part was the other students at my boarding school. They were all so smart and interesting, and still are. I still love talking to them on facebook every day. I can’t find the link, but a few years ago read a very comprehensive study that concluded the single most significant advantage of private school is not the academics or facilities, but social networking — i.e., private school grads tend to be more successful in life because private school sets you up with a network of contacts, who tend to come from more influential circles. LOL, I am actually one of the least ambitious/successful of my schoolmates, but they are nice enough to keep talking to me.Now, back to my daughter. My husband & I both had full-time corporate jobs when she was little, so we had to arrange for her to be somewhere during the workday. She was in an excellent in-home daycare situation for her first 3 years, but the lady there noted that she really seemed ready for a more school-like setting, so we had to find her a pre-school. There were no public school options at that age, so pre-school would have to be private.Well, almost right behind our house was a Montessori school with a lovely campus, so we enrolled her there. Her first couple years there were so good, we didn’t even switch her to public school when she was old enough for kindergarten.The school actually goes all the way through high school, so we started to assume she would be a “lifer”. Between what a good experience she was having those first few years, and the fact that we were spending so much time with the other families in that school, and going longer and longer without having any dealings with the public schools, the idea of the ‘big bad scary public school system’ came to loom in my imagination, so it became increasingly daunting to consider switching her.Instead, I increased my commitment to her little private school. And that was my “mistake”, because when I got more involved in helping the school, I learned more about the workings of its administration, and what I learned caused some concern. (Kind of like the saying about seeing the sausage being made.)This process was strikingly similar to stories you read on Quora about people becoming disillusioned with their church, or people gradually facing the fact that their spouses are cheating/abusive.At first, when I would learn of a problem or bad management decision by the school’s administration, I would just think, well we just need to fix that. But then it would not get fixed, and often the administration would just go on to make yet another stupid decision.Enrollment was declining, in a school that was already starting to feel claustrophobic. Each grade in the high school consisted of fewer than 25 students — that’s the entire grade. Imagine your high school graduating class being about 20 kids. Of course the school would spin that fact as being an advantage: that it showed how exclusive/selective the school was, and how much personal attention your child would have there, yadda yadda.But the truth is, they really were not very selective: they were dying for students.They were also dying for money. There was constant pressure on parents to volunteer time, donate more money, help raise donations, etc. And they kept cutting programs, or adding on fees to the parents to cover the costs of incidentals that had previously been included with tuition. Meanwhile, tuition kept climbing. It really was like being in an abusive relationship or a cult religion, where gradually they get you to where you are giving more and more to receive less and less, yet you stay, thinking it is so vital to make this thing work.One of my most disheartening realizations was how hard it would be to get the number of parents protesting the problems to reach a critical mass so that the administration and BoT would have to take notice and clean up their act — because parents were not all realizing the problems at the same time. Any one family would wake up and realize the place was messed up, and find a few others to commiserate with, but most of the parents were still drinking the Kool-Aid. So the newly awoken parents would figure why bother, and just switch their kid(s) to another school — this is the Washington DC suburbs, where there are tons of school options. So at any given time, nearly all the parents remaining were still under the spell, or maybe still in the process of waking up to the extent of the problems and still hoping they could be fixed. So, if you tried to bring a concern to the administration, their response was that pretty much all the other parents seemed happy with things, so the complaining parent must be the one with the problem.Then, at the end of my daughter’s 7th grade year, more than a THIRD of the faculty resigned, including both deans. Some of the resignations were normal turnover, but most were dissatisfied, to say the least, and in the case of the 2 deans and a few others, it was definitely a case of them banding together to resign in protest of management.I actually steered clear of that whole debacle, as I was already involved in a few other grievance issues and was trying not to be the kind of parent who gets involved in every single complaint.Still, I was starting to get on the principal’s sh!t-list for being a complainer. By this time, I’d been involved with the school several years longer than he had. I was in my 11th year as a parent, while he was in his 6th as principal. Even then, I was still trying to work with the administration and BoT to get him to clean up his act, rather than fire him. Apparently, though, some other parents were a little further along than I in the disillusionment process, and they pressured him to resign. I’d been just about to give up on the school, but hoped the fact that they had gone so far as to push him out meant they were coming around, so we decided to hang in a little longer. I even hoped that all those teachers resigning at once a few months prior had gotten their attention as I’d never been able to do, so maybe they were finally changing their approach.Our daughter had started 8th grade by this time, so if she were going to switch schools, we wanted her to be able to start at her new school right from the beginning of high school, i.e., 9th grade. So, we figured if things weren’t better by the end of 8th grade, we wouldn’t be back the next year.She didn’t even make it to the end of 8th grade!The principal was being allowed to stay to the end of the year himself, while they did a head hunt search for his repacement. But even though he was a lame duck, he managed to do more damage.It started with a stupid little screw-up on the part of a teacher. It was childish and irresponsible behavior, and so I can see why she might be embarrassed, but still: grow up and own your mistake, say your sorry, and move on. Simple, right? But not for this teacher. The term “Narcissist” gets thrown around a lot lately, especially on Quora; we’re very quick these days to label someone as NPD. But if I’m really scrupulous, I can only think of a couple people I’ve known in my life whom I’d unreservedly label NPD. This teacher was one of those (She was also the ONLY teacher I ever complained about in my 11 years at that school).Well, Ms. Narcissist couldn’t say she was sorry, so she went to great lengths to avoid it, including pressuring 2 teenage students to lie! Which snowballed into the matter coming to the attention of lame duck principal, who jacked it up further, including slandering me for being the one to raise concerns about the NPD teacher, because, as I said, I was already on the principal’s sh!t-list. The problem was, the way he chose to slander me was to portray me as a major b!tch. Fine, I don’t really care, but among their attempts to support this accusation, they also referred to my daughter as some sort of tantrum-throwing brat.NOT OKAY! This was my innocent 13-year-old daughter, who had aboslutely nothing to do with the matter. They had no right to drag her into their little hissy fit against me.Our family learned about this and other stuff that had been going on behind our backs, because another staff person was really bothered by how our family was being treated, so she broke ranks and told us, even though they’d told her not to speak to me.Their excuse for keeping us in the dark was that I was allegedly so volatile that I would probably do some sort of scary retaliation.Well, I did do something in a hurry: we pulled our daughter out of that school. She never set foot on its property again. Her friends cleaned out her locker and brought her stuff to us. We returned her team uniforms, books, anything that belonged to the school. We did not get any money back, even though the school year was not even half over. We had a helluva good grounds for a lawsuit, but that would have caused discomfort for my already-traumatized daughter, and for the many fine people on staff there who were not to blame for the actions of the principal and Ms. NPD. So I would say I went pretty easy on them, not anything like the psycho-b!tch they said I would be.By the way, if anyone in this story should be accused of being vindictive/retaliatory, I’m thinking it’s the parties who respond to a valid customer complaint by slandering the customer’s family, including the customer’s innocent 13-year-old daughter.Meanwhile, we continued to hear about more screw-ups and scandals. They can’t blame me, because I had left with no fuss, so ha. A few weeks later, Ms. NPD told a classroom full of students that my daughter had been expelled (um, no, I had notified them that we were withdrawing her and I have the letter we got back from their lawyer, saying they’d like a chance to discuss it with us first, to change our minds. Which we of course declined) and that the reason she was expelled was that she was a racist! Her BFF who came and told us this is black, btw, and joined us in shaking our heads trying to figure out how the hell this teacher thought this accusation would ever fly, because there has been literally nothing in my daughter’s conduct, EVER, that could by any stretch be construed as racist. Wow, yet more grounds for a lawsuit, but I did nothing — because my focus was on my daughter’s transition to her new school.Which, by the way, was great! Since we’d only had a couple days to switch her out of the abusive cult private school, we just put her in the public school. Not a single one of the scary things we’d heard or imagined about public schools held true. The middle school where she finished out 8th grade was great, and within the very first week, she was really happy she had switched.She’s now in 10th grade in public high school, and is thriving. The friends she has made are great kids, she has more course options and other opportunities than she would have back in the tiny abusive cult school. She is on honor roll, and her school’s daily schedule is more compatible with her job at the “barn” (the horse center where she’s been working since age 12). Between her having more time, and us having more money (since we were no longer paying private school tuition), she increased her involvement at the barn, earning more money, and improving so much as a rider that she has been winning a lot more horse shows and is captain of her team, even though she’s only a sophmore.I can only kick myself for having been so stupid as to have kept her in that stupid private school for so long. The lesson I learned is that private schools are not necessarily as good as the one I attended, not even necessarily as good as public schools. They can be horrible, as long as they can find enough sucker parents they can fool. And again, they are not accountable to anyone.I said at the beginning that this was the most personal post I’ve made on Quora, but reading back over this, it doesn’t sound very personal, because I did not go into the details. I don’t want to talk about those details here, but it really was personally traumatic. Yes, there are more traumatic experiences that people write about on Quora; heck, I myself have had some more traumatic experiences than this one, but I’ve never written about those; I can’t even write about this in full detail. I will just say it still bothers me; I have not getten any closure.So that’s the long term effect my own private school and my daughter’s private school have had on me.As for the effect on her, well I’m relieved it seems not to have scarred her much, and that she is doing so well, although of course I wonder if she might be doing even better if we’d switched her out sooner.Also, when I say it didn’t scar her much, the fact is that even now she has occasional nightmares of being back at that school. When she first mentioned it, I thought she meant the usual nightmares a lot of folks have where you’re back in school and it’s the end of term and you’ve missed almost all the lectures and are about to fail the final, etc., and then you realize hey, I haven’t attended this school in years; I must be dreaming. But my daughter said no, that her dreams that she is back at that school are not about schoolwork or grades, but rather about feeling trapped and suffocating.Although it’s been 2 years, the abusive cult private school is still right behind our house, and I still hear updates on the latest debacles and scandals. the lame duck principal is of course gone, but his protegee and right-hand woman is still there, carrying on his ill-judged policies. The NPD teacher was gone by the end of that year, but I never heard definitively whether she was forced out — because of course she would play it off as her having resigned on her own, whether or not that was the case.Some days I still toy with the idea of suing them, wondering if that would finally give me closure, because so far, I don’t feel like I have any closure.