School For The Bullied, Gets Bullied

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By Paul Meekin

Some – not all – kids just can’t handle it. Perhaps they’re precocious, a teacher’s pet, simply “weird,” or have ears that stick out. For whatever reason, the mainstream educational system sometimes fails the students it seeks to prepare for the real world. Be it via bullying, large class size, or an inability to make the material appealing, simply put a one-size-fits-all approach to schooling has been proven inefficient and ineffective for many students.

That’s why there many schooling options: Private school, home School, technical School, agricultural school, and on and on.

In the case of the embattled Chapman Farm School – the major focus is on emotional intelligence and personal growth. See, they focus on helping enrolling students who have been bullied or left behind by ‘the system’. The beauty here is that this school isn’t designed to coddle the students from those challenges. Instead it’s designed to prepare kids who may be hyper sensitive to aggressive kids or anxiety, for the real world.

It’s really quite wonderful and if the success of the school is to be believed, a strong case for school choice, privately funded education, and a rebuttal of government everything.

Chapman will be seeking full accreditation in the coming years.

They are also seeking a new home in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, on a Llama farm, and local residents are not happy – suing the town to stop the school from going in. The residents are citing the traffic problems the studentry would create for the cul-de-sac, on which the Llama farm resides.

The 24 student school recently bought a small bus to transport students.

“They don’t understand what the school is about and how little impact it will have on the neighborhood – and yet they are fighting it tooth and nail,” said Maureen Chapman, who sold the land to the school in the first place.

So now we have a situation. A new location for a school for the ‘bullied’, local neighbors worried those bullied students will cause enough of a ruckus to ruin their community, a llama farm, lawyers, the government.

What a mess.

Why do we need hearings and lawsuits…over traffic concerns in a cul-de-sac? There’s now an appeal to the court approval for the school, town meetings, and meanwhile the kids are are in limbo, unsure when and if they’ll move to their new location.

Libertarians, who might balk at a school like this, would hopefully defend its right to exist, and would instead direct their balking at the neighbors who seem to think 24 kids on a giant farm will ruin their day and bemoan the fact this much litigation is required in the first place – why can’t they just buy the farm, open the school, teach the kids, and go from there?

People like to think they are charitable until they’re not. Charitable until they are faced with a situation that is good for people other than themselves. Just like residents in neighboring West Bridgewater, Massachusetts ‘don’t have a problem’ with autistic adults but somehow seem to think they have super-strength, I’m certain the residents of East Bridgewater Massachusetts abhor bullying, but seem to think the very tiny school designed to eliminate it will cause too much of a disturbance.

EDITOR’s NOTE: The views expressed are those of the author, they are not necessarily representative of The Libertarian Republic or its sponsors.

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