@flip86 Well, we do have alternatives usually available. Depends partly on the size of the city. There usually is another school in the district, or private, or home school, or a charter school, but it is up to the kid to tell their parent life at school sucks and for the parent to take it seriously and do something. Often parents have no idea how tortured their child feels. Also, some school districs make changing schools difficult, some adults think kids should work through things, some parents cannot afford some of the other options available, it isn’t just as simple as alternatives being available. There are schools for children with fairly serious psychological problems, but most parents would want to avoid those schools, because they tend to have some pretty out of control kids in them. We had a school at the psych hospital I worked at, it was part of the county public system, so children who were hospitalized still kept up with their work. Everything had to be nailed down. I’m not talking about stealing, I mean in case they flipped out and wanted to throw a desk into a wall, that sort of thing. Most of the children were calm, good kids, who were troubled. Where I grew up kids who did not behave got moved to the last resort public school, probably a portion of the students were mentally ill.
The shooting in Colorado in Littleton, those two kids never would have been put in an alternative school I don’t think, except if they had communicated to an adult, especially their parents, that they were at their wits end and felt the urge to harm people.