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This is my cry for help. Our son's school is broken and we can't fix it. If you know of a school that could help, please tell me the name and city. We'll move there and enroll him and find jobs.

He just turned nine years old. He has violent rages at school (but not at home.) He is very easy to set off, and very difficult to calm. School staff restrains him (holds him down on the floor with their hands) three to five days per week. This has been going on for nearly two years. Educational progress is also nil. He is capable of learning but they are not capable of teaching him.

Our educational district has an alternative school for children with behavior problems and emotional problems. Their methods of rewards for good behavior and consequences for bad behavior just don't work for our son. Here's why:

Dr. Greene suggests that consequences can be very useful as an instrument of motivation or of teaching children right from wrong. However he is cautious about their use, particularly for these children and explains his concern as follows:

* These children typically already know that their behavior is inappropriate, but when frustrated lose the ability to access and utilize the information.
* These children typically are already motivated to not behave this way, which is often expressed in their remorse after an episode.
* Consequences are not effective in teaching the lacking cognitive skills that precipitate meltdowns in the first place.
* Threats of punishment and/or prior punishment experiences don’t help these children learn to stay calm enough to be able to think clearly in the midst of frustration, and can actually accelerate the disintegration, by increasing their frustration.
* Punishment tends to shift the frustration from the problem to the parent and can shut down communication, a vital tool for expanding the child’s skills. Source: http://www.explosivekids.org/faq/index.html

Our son is what Dr. Ross Greene calls inflexible/explosive child. Dr. Greene's book The Explosive Child is here: http://www.ccps.info/books/books.html

The CPS [Collaborative Problem Solving] model -- which was first articulated in the book, The Explosive Child -- proposes that challenging behavior should be understood and handled in the same manner as other recognized learning disabilities. In other words, difficult children and adolescents lack important cognitive skills essential to handling frustration and mastering situations requiring flexibility and adaptability. The CPS model helps adults teach these skills and teaches caregivers and children to work toward mutually satisfactory solutions to the problems causing conflict. RESEARCH has shown that CPS is a highly effective model of outpatient care and can be an effective means of reducing restraint and locked-door seclusion and reducing staff and patient injuries in restrictive/therapeutic settings. Source: http://www.ccps.info/

There aren't any suitable private schools here. We are going to move to a community that has a school that can handle inflexible/explosive kids, enroll our son, and find jobs.

Please tell us the names/locations of any schools that you would recommend. We will go where the school is. There is no reason to stay where we are now, and every reason to move. It would be irresponsible to let our son re-enter his current school in the fall, so we want to move in time to start him at a new school.

That's the important part. We need to find a school and we need it soon. Feel free to pass this question on to anyone who might have useful knowledge. I set up an email address just for responses. Feel free to pass it on: jerome.smitt@gmail.com . (My real name is something else.)

The rest of this is just a description of our son's troubles, and it is pretty typical for inflexible/explosive. He's got plenty of labels - ADHD, O.D.D., anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, non-verbal learning disorder. Although some people have wondered if he might be autistic, psycho-neuro testing has ruled out Aspbergers and the rest of the autism spectrum.

As an infant, he was always easy to cry and hard to settle. Not a self-soother. There was a period of night terrors - he would up screaming and fighting. His eyes were open but there was nobody home.

Out of control rages have been typical of him since toddlerhood and day care centers could not handle him. He's had several therapists. Generally he gets along well with them and he can have useful productive discussions about how to handle anger, what he should do when he feels angry, what are reasonable and unreasonable behaviors, etc., but when he actually gets angry he doesn't have access to any of that and therapy does not seem to have made any improvement.

He's got medications - concerta for ADHD, trileptal as a mood stabilizer for bipolar, zoloft for fears, abilify for rages. When we switched psychiatrists the new doctor pretty much agreed with the previous doctor's finding and medication. There has been a little tinkering with dosages, but that's all.

He had pubic hair at age six, but an endocrinologist who followed him has not been concerned - it is not true puberty, but just a bit of fat-stimulated extra testosterone. Yes, he's fat. The abilify doesn't help, the genes his mom and I passed on to him don't help, and having fat parents as role models doesn't help either. ...sigh.... He's got obesity clinic. His pediatrician ordered a brain MRI to look for any organic defects, but there was nothing out of the ordinary found.

School is broken. He started in a regular classroom in kindergarten, and slowly began getting more and more services for speech and for reading and fine-motor control. By the middle of first grade he was in the special-ed room full time. By November in second grade they moved him to the alternate school for behavior and emotional disorder kids. Within his first month there he had his first arrest and was taken by the Sheriff to the Juvenile Office, kicking and screaming, with handcuffs on his wrists and on his ankles.

Arrests and criminal complaints by the school have been frequent. At one point the senior Juvenile Officer determined that he would set a court date and have our son named a Ward of the Court. He ended up coming to an IEP meeting and concluded that we were doing all we could, and there wasn't anything he could ask a Judge to order that we weren't already doing on our own. But it was a near thing.

At his January 2006 IEP, halfway through third grade, I realized that he had not achieved any academic learning over the year and a half he had been at the school. Reading was at the same level he had entered, math was slightly better but still not up to the level of a first grader, handwriting was illegible. When he entered the alternative school they took away his special classes in reading and his occupational therapy, and left him with just a little speech therapy. They claimed that he wouldn't need it because classroom size was small and he'd get everything he needed in the classroom.

I requested more evaluation at the January IEP, and by the time they were ready to present evaluation results I had an experienced advocate in our corner. He is also a hearing officer. By the end of the May IEP (the school stalled at every stage) our advocate recommended we hire a lawyer and file for due process. The school was out of compliance on many issues and completely resistant to change. In our advocate's opinion the school is not providing an appropriate education. In my opinion the school has failed my son for nearly two years, they are incapable of helping him or teaching him, and I will not hand him over to them to try again. They have stalled, they have refused to engage in reasonable discussion about his needs, and they have lied to me.

And I am damn tired of him being restrained an average of (according to the school principal) 3-5 days per week.

There is no private school in commuting distance of our home that can help him. He is okay at home (far from perfect, but we can deal) so he does not need a boarding school or residential facility. He needs a competent day school, and we'll have to move whereever we find one, and we need help finding one. email jerome.smitt@gmail.com . (it's "smith" here but "smitt" on gmail. I'm neither Jerome or Smith or Smitt. If anyone does a google search on his name or mine a few years from now, I don't want them to find this post.

We're moving to a better school. Where is it?