178: A Mother’s Wake-Up Call About Bullying And SEL

When Ali Johnson’s teenage daughter started saying she didn’t want to go to school, Ali initially thought she was dealing with normal middle school conflict.

Then everything changed.

After a serious accusation from two students, the school required Ali’s daughter to undergo an outside evaluation before returning to class. Even after she was cleared to return, administrators continued pushing the family toward additional outside services and requested permission to communicate directly with those providers.

Meanwhile, the bullying that started the entire situation continued.

In this episode of The Homeschool How To Podcast, Ali shares the story of the incident that ultimately led her family to leave traditional school and begin homeschooling.

We talk about bullying in schools, school mental health policies, social emotional learning (SEL), parental rights, private Christian schools, teen social media, deschooling, homeschooling teenagers, and what parents may not realize their children are experiencing at school.

Ali also shares what happened when she finally asked her daughter one life-changing question:

“What if you never had to go back to school?”

Two years later, Ali describes her daughter as a completely different person.

“It’s like she lives in color now.”

If your child is struggling with bullying, dreading school, or simply doesn’t seem like themselves anymore—or if you’ve ever wondered whether homeschooling could be an option for your family—this is a conversation you’ll want to hear.

Connect with Ali: 

YT: @HoosierAli

IG: @HoosierAli

Resources from Cheryl: 🎓 

New to homeschooling? Grab the free 30-Day Quick Start Guide 

📚 Knowing exactly what to teach is the hard part, so I broke it down for you in plain English! Grab this today — What Do I Actually Teach? 

💻 Want to Homeschool but still have to work? Check out my course on how to do just that: How to Work and Homeschool course

Transcript

Why We Chose Homeschooling

SPEAKER_01 0:02

I didn't plan to homeschool. I started asking hard questions, realized how little control parents actually have, and made the hard decision to leave a government job to homeschool my kids. Now I interview other homeschooling parents to learn how this all works. I'm Cheryl, and this is the Homeschool How-To podcast. Let's learn this together. Before

When A Teen Says No School

SPEAKER_01 0:24

we get into today's episode, I want you to imagine something. Your 14-year-old daughter keeps telling you she doesn't want to go to school. You think it's normal teenage drama, maybe some mean girl stuff, you know, things that we all went through. And then one day you realize you had absolutely no idea what was actually happening. That's what happened to my guest today. Allie sent her daughters to public school, then private Christian school, believing she was doing everything she was supposed to do. Until an incident involving her daughter, two other students, and the school administrator made her start questioning everything. What I find most interesting about this conversation isn't that Allie eventually pulled both of her daughters out of school. It's what she says happened to her daughter afterwards. A child who once begged not to go to school is now, in her mother's words, living in color. And I think this episode is especially important because children don't always come home and tell us exactly what's happening. Sometimes they don't even realize that what they're experiencing isn't normal. So whether your kids are in public school, private school, or you've been quietly wondering if homeschooling could actually be an option for your family, I want you to listen to this entire conversation. And

A Free Guide For Starting

SPEAKER_01 1:25

if that last part sounds like you, if you've thought about homeschooling but immediately followed it with I d I don't even know how to begin. I've created a free guide that can walk you through your first 30 days, and you can get that in the show's description. Alright, now here's my conversation with Allie. Welcome!

Meet Allie And The SEL Rabbit Hole

SPEAKER_01 1:40

And with us today I have Allie Johnson. Allie, thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

You reached out to me a couple of weeks ago, and uh I had to rush to get you on the podcast because it was very relevant to a post that I had had and things I had started seeing. And the post, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it was that I was kind of talking about the SEL in the school system, which is social emotional learning. And I just kind of created a post. I don't even do this a lot, uh, but I it I was just talking to the camera about like what I had uncovered. Somebody that I knew who was a psychologist said to me, Yes, my daughter goes to the school district that we are in. She said, But I take her out of the SEL. And I said, Well, I don't even know what that is. And she kind of explained to me, it's this it's this thing about learning your emotions, which is so wonderful, yada yada. But then it works in like, are you feeling uncomfortable in your skin? And maybe we should do something about that, and we have things we can do, and maybe you're the wrong gender, and then we're starting to give you hormone blockers, which sounds drastic and crazy. But I have actually had people on my podcast that this has happened to, and you reached out, and I was like, Yeah, I really I would love to share your story. Not because I want people to fear their kids going to school, but I want parents to be aware because if they are in the school system, maybe they could like counteract this before it goes too far, or maybe this is your deciding factor to homeschool. So let's take us back to the beginning. How many

Public School To Private School Promise

SPEAKER_01 3:09

kids do you have, and were they in the traditional school system?

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Okay, so I have I have a grown stepson, so he's 30, he's married, he has a child, and it's fantastic. So that was my first, you know, beginning into motherhood as a stepmom. I have two daughters at home that are now 16 and a half and 19 and a half, so two daughters, and yes, we went the traditional route. I didn't know anybody that homeschooled ever, so that wasn't, you know, something that I had ever considered. And there's a lot to this. So I'm we're from originally from Indiana, but 10 years ago in 2016, we moved to Memphis, Tennessee area, and my kids went to public school at the time, it was first grade and third grade, and you know, I just like I said, I had never considered homeschooling. I didn't know anybody, I knew like one or two people that homeschooled after I got married and had my own kids, but it it's not something I'd had ever considered. And I had been a stay-at-home mom since 2014, so due to health issues, and and it was fantastic. I liked be I loved being a stay-at-home mom, it just never occurred to me to be homeschooled. And so the post that I saw about the social emotional learning sparked a memory that I hadn't thought about in 10 years, and it was when we sent the girls to a very good public school in the Memphis area, like we moved to that town, that suburb for the schools, you know, they had a great score and all that, and I remember getting an email from you know admin, and I I had not been down any rabbit holes, I was very, you know, I was a normie, I didn't know anything about anything, but I remember getting a an email about social emotional learning, and because of the demographics in Memphis, Tennessee, it was more a focus on racial disparities, basically, and it was very, very subtle and veiled, and so I didn't think much about it, and like I said, I completely forgot about that. So my kids went to public school until 2019-2020, and my at the time my oldest daughter was getting ready to go into sixth grade, my my youngest daughter was gonna go into fourth grade, and I'll just let you know, middle school is a thing. Now, you might not have that problem because of the homeschooling stuff, but like in a school situation, it is one of the most difficult times because it's all of the you know the growing adolescence and that kind of thing. So we decided to pull them out. And in Memphis, it's very, very common to have you to send yours to send your kids to private school, so which was not a thing that I was ever, you know, in Indiana, it's not as prominent, at least not where I grew up. So we decided to send them to a Christian private school, and you know, it was great. I was so excited about it, trying to kind of escape the problems of the public school, you know, like the bullying and that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

Mean girls, mean yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

And by that time, you know, we had social media. My kids had social media, and so that's probably one of my biggest regrets is to allow my kids to have social media before they would you know because that was kind of just the time people were unleashing it to their kids, and all the kids in school had it.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

So it's hard to be like, Well, how is this detrimental? Because you didn't know what it was capable of, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:43

That's true. So I I have to lean on that and have grace with myself, and it is and we've learned a lot. So then my kids were going sixth grade, fourth grade in private Christian school, and I thought we were safe, you know. And then 2020 happened.

Zoom School And Social Media Mean Girls

SPEAKER_00 7:00

So then my kids came home, and my husband works from home, had for the most part, had a he has a remote job, so and I like I said, I was a stay-at-home mom, so we were all together all the time, and and the private school, they had the teachers do like completely do Zoom classes like every period, and so the kids were in front of the computer, and it was horrible. My oldest daughter hated it because she is very much I want to be in-person, instruction, that kind of thing. My youngest daughter, who is I don't, a second child, like a wild child, you know, she just is not a typical student, so she she just couldn't do it, you know. She was probably about 10, and so it was a nightmare, but they at least had you know things to do, and thankfully, COVID did not change our lives very much because my husband had been remote for a long time, and so we were just all together, and you know, I didn't think a lot about it, but we started having some issues with online, you know, problems like oh, this kid at school, I got a haircut and I posted about it on social media, and then they said that I was, you know, I it was just a lot of mean girl stuff, and it exacerbated it. So both of my girls have learning differences. I I think that's what we were always that was what it was called, you know. Oh, they have learning differences, and they both had IEPs, but in private school and where we were, they didn't, I mean, they didn't even look at it, we didn't even have to file it or anything. So we just did fine, and then you know, went back to school. And in Memphis, so Memphis, Tennessee is in Shelby County, and so in Shelby County, it's the largest county in the whole state, which means they have their own state health department. So Tennessee as a state, you know, said, Okay, you don't have to, you know, well, we'll determine our own things, but because Shelby County is it has its own health department, they did a crackdown because we were gonna send them back to school for 2020-21, and they said you have to mask them. And we were like, but we said you said you wouldn't have to mask them, and it's like, well, the state health department or the county, pardon me, the county health department could come in and shut us down, and so that was a whole thing. And anyway, so we had all of these the it was more of the um pandemic things for that school year, and then the next school year. So my oldest daughter was in eighth grade, it got a little bit easier on the social emotional stuff, but then my youngest daughter was going into sixth grade, and after that year completed, we got out for the summer, we're like, Yay, school's out for the summer, you know, had a big party. We got an email a week later that the school was defunct, shut down, yeah, just shut down. And and why?

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Because of COVID?

SPEAKER_00 9:54

No, well, that was a part of it. It was basically fund funding, they didn't have contracts, so you know, parents would be like, Yeah, I'll pay you, and they just never would. It was just a mess, it was just poorly managed, and so that private Christian school went belly up. So then my husband and I we had to we had moved to a different county, so we were out of Shelby County, which was fantastic, and we were in a really rural area, we had to find a new school for

Bullying Escalates In A Small School

SPEAKER_00 10:21

them. So we found a new private school, it was a private Christian school, and it was so my youngest daughter was in by this time she was in eighth grade. My oldest daughter was in 10th grade. They went there, you know, they did fine, but my youngest daughter started struggling with the peer group. It was a very small school. I think there were 20 eighth graders, you know, it was it was very small, and she's it my youngest has never liked school, and you know, she's just not a typical learner. She's ADHD, and she, you know, she can focus like anything if it's something that interests her, but she always struggled to do homework, and she was always, you know, she didn't test well and all these things, and then she started telling me she didn't want to go to school, she did not want to go to school, and by that time, some other things had happened, and she did not have access, she did not have an iPhone or a smartphone, she did not have an iPad, she did not have any tech. And she started telling me, Oh, these, you know, there were some friend group, there was a friend group there, and but they were kind of you know picking at each other, and one day she said to me, Mom, I don't want I'm not going to school. And she's she can be very obstinate when she says she's not doing it, like she's not gonna do it. So I was like, No, you have to go to school. And so this is on a Thursday, and this was in February of 2024, and she had she had been telling me that she had struggled. The guidance counselor had called me one time and said, Hey, can you come down to the school? We've been having some issues, and you know, these girls are saying that this that your daughter did this, and my daughter, you know, my kids are not like I don't say they're perfect, you know, they make mistakes, they do things, you know, that they shouldn't do, whatever. But she's like, you know, this girl is saying that she's upset because your child did this, but it wasn't at school and it wasn't on school equipment. And like I said, my daughter didn't have tech at that point, so I said, Well, is you know, is my is she come coming to you? She's like, Yes, she's coming to me and talking about having problems with her peer group, you know. And I said, Okay, I just wasn't even thinking about it, and I said, Okay, and that was in December, right before Christmas break. So we go on Christmas break, we come back, she goes back to school, she's doing fine. But then in February, the middle of February, she's like, I'm not going to school. This one girl told me she was going to fight me. And I'm like, What? No, you know, I'm thinking, no, this it can't be. That can't be. You know, we don't fight, physically fight. And I'm like, that doesn't make sense. I said, have you talked to the guidance counselor? You know, because thinking, okay, the guidance counselor's gonna help. You know, I'll help you with re conflict resolution strategies. I'm like, okay, so you know, she and I asked her sister, I asked my other daughter, I said, have you noticed this? Because they had shared lunch, and she's like, Yeah, they're kind of you know, picking on her, you know, teasing her, making fun of her, that kind of thing. And I was like, Well, what's going on? So it was a Thursday, a Thursday or Friday. I was going to an appointment, and that was the morning that my daughter said, I'm not going to school. And I said, You're going to school. And she, you know, thinking this was just gonna blow over, all that. No. She called me an hour later, and she's like, Mom, this girl said she was going to beat me up after school. And I'm like, What do you to what are you talking about? This had never, you know, occurred to me that that would happen. And I said, You know, so I'm 50 years old, so I give her the conversation, you know, I give her the talk that I got. You know, if she hits you, you hit her back, you know, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

I got that talk too.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Yeah, and so because I'm like, nobody gets to, you know, hit you. And I'm like, she was almost hysterical. And I said, What about the guidance counselor? Where are you? And she's like, No, she's not in her office. I've been here for you know a while. And that it was like 9 30 in the morning. So I'm like, okay, so I had an appointment. I get out of my appointment and I have missed calls from the school. And I'm like, okay, so I I call the school and I talk to the guidance counselor. She said, Your daughter's been in the office the whole morning. She's not been in her classes. You know, what could you come down? I said, Yeah, you know, like got right there. We didn't live that far from the school. And I'm like, go in. My daughter is sitting in the office, the front office. She'd been there the whole day, and I said, What's going on? And she's like, Well, so I the guidance counselor and another administrator say they have been talking to my daughter, just her, and the two administrators for like an hour and a half, and that she is having all these problems with conflict conflict resolution in her peer groups, and that they have talked to the other kids. And the other kids, two other children reported that my daughter said, I'm going to hurt myself if yeah, and then I'm gonna blame it's gonna be your fault. Like said that she was gonna kill herself.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

And I'm like, She would what like blame them in a letter?

SPEAKER_00 15:16

It would be that other child's fault. Yeah, like, oh, you know what, I'm gonna kill myself, and then it'll be your fault.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Yeah, I mean, I can see someone saying that in a desperation, like if you're threatening to beat me up, I'm gonna do something first and blame you so that you're actually afraid to beat me up in the first place. Yeah, I can under that as I mean, I don't I'm no psychologist, but it's actually probably a pretty smart tactic.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Right, it you know, I can see somebody, especially when you're a child, you know, like young person, I can understand saying something that you know that you do that out of desperation or out of you know, but you're not actually meaning you're trying to get the person to back off. Right. So

Forced Assessment Without Clear Policy

SPEAKER_00 15:56

when I get there, the administrators are telling me the guidance counselor, who is at the time literally just a mom. She is not trained, she has she's not trained, she has no expert expertise. She is taking online courses through a university for guidance counseling. Okay, you can get the job with that credential. Well, yes, yes, and they say because these two children, I said, did any adult hear it? Did her teacher hear it? Because, you know, did an adult hear her say this? Because these are the children that she's been having trouble with. And like I sit in this office and I'm crying because I'm like, oh my gosh, this is like much, much deeper than I realized. There is a lot of, you know, there's bullying, actual bullying. That's more than just picking getting picked on. And I said, and then, you know, they said, well, because these children reported that she was going to harm herself, you have to take her home, get her assessed by a mental health assessment professional, and she cannot return to school until she has done the questionnaire, like the mental health assessment questionnaire, and that is cleared. And if she tet if she answers any of the questions that she's at risk, then we have to do a risk assessment plan between you and the mental health professional, and then it's going to be something you know that she you have to get her counseling, like therapy. And I said, Okay, so I'm like, so let me just tell you this. My dad, when I was about 12 and a half, my dad was diagnosed as a manic depressive, which is what they used to call bipolar, and so I know the system of the mental health, and it will get if you get into it, it will chew you up and spit you out. So I was very familiar with mental health and all of these issues, and I'm like, you're basing all of this on two children saying that she said this.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

She so she probably didn't even say this. She did, but they told the counselor that she did. Yes, yes, the day was. I was thinking, like, oh well, if I wanted to get out of being beat up, like that'd be a pretty good good tactic, you know. Sure. But she never even that never even crossed her mind to say this just the part of the bullying. Yes, yes, and so I said holy moly.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Yes, because one of the other children I found out much later, after it was, you know, not an issue, but I found out what m much, much later that one of the children that reported this had extensive history and had talked about it openly. It's like a badge of honor now, like had been in a mental health, juvenile mental health issue, you know, in place like eight times.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Oh my gosh. So she knew the keywords to say to the guidance counselor. That's even worse. Yes, and so oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Yeah, so that actually was a Thursday. I remember that it was a Thursday and it was in February, and I walked out of there and I was like, and I I remember saying, you know, because at the time, I was like, there are waiting lists for mental health, you know, for psychiatrists. And at the time there was like months waiting lists, and the psychs were only doing Zoom calls and for students, you know, because it was, you know, it was pretty much at crisis level because of the pandemic. And I'm like, where am I gonna take her to get her assessed? And I remembered that all of the pediatricians, every single time you go in, do that mental health assessment. And so I talked to my daughter, I said, if you said it out of exasperation, it's okay. People say things they don't mean. And my issue was not with a child reporting they heard another child say it, because I do think it's important, like if you hear somebody say something like that, you should tell an adult. I can, you know, I can appreciate that. But the stance that the guidance counselor took was that my daughter had said it because, you know, and this is what they were gonna do. They had no policy on file. I scoured their policy. They had no, they said they could she could not return to school until she had a health assessment. And when she did, they would have to do a re-entry meeting with us for her to go back to school. Now, this was a private school, a Christian private school, that we had paid tuition. We had just paid tuition because it was February, so we had just paid it in January, and I had just paid the non-refundable money to register them for the next year, and so it was so I get home. I said, Why were you questioning her for like an hour and a half? And why didn't you call their dad? You know, my husband was at home. Oh well, we tried to, but we couldn't get in touch with him. They had not called him. He's he was like 10 minutes away. They had not called him, he had no missed calls, and so I get home, and my husband is 58, he's a little bit older than me. You know, he was in the army. He was like, Why do we have to take her and get her assessed and and why is all this happening? She, you know, she can't return to school and all these things. And I said, I don't know, but but she said she promises it she didn't say it. And I said, I really don't think she said it. I think these girls, I mean, you know what 14-year-old girls are like? You they they weaponized the guidance counselor, you know, and they played her against the other. And so over that weekend, I just happened to see Joe Rogan and Abigail Schreier talking about all of this, all like bad therapy, all of these things. And it it was layered, it wasn't just one thing or the other because at the at this school, there is there has been talk from the time my my youngest daughter was seven. All of the ideology stuff, all of the gender stuff, all of that stuff is happening everywhere. Like I couldn't believe it was happening in some small rural, you know, Tennessee school. It Christian school. Not that Christian school gives you any kind of protection. It doesn't, because human beings are human beings and children are children. But I listened to that podcast and I was like, all of this stuff is happening. It's it's not one thing or the other. It's the social emotional learning. It is the outsourcing to the experts. It's the gender ideology. It's the, you know, we know best for your children. And it's the it's all of it. It's the your child can't sit still for eight hours a day, six hours a day, they need to be medicated. It's all of it. And so it just really opened my eyes, and my husband and I talked about it. I did take my daughter to the pediatrician. I was still, you know, kind of like, I gotta do what the experts say. And, you know, she answered no on the questionnaires because she wasn't at risk for, you know, self-harm. We did the re-entry meeting and I said, How, you know, to the guidance counselor, I said, can you assure me that can you change the seating arrangements around? The kids were like teasing my daughter because they're like, she had mentioned that my dad, her grandfather had bipolar. He had he had passed away in 2022. And they're like, Oh, well, maybe you have, maybe you're bipolar, maybe you're autistic, you act like you're autistic. Yeah, I mean, it was it was a lot. It was a lot of things. And and then the other thing that really made me nutty is, you know, I asked my kid, I said, you know, what what other kinds of things were they saying? And I said, What did the guidance counselor who had assured me and that I trusted, what did, what did she say? She's like, Well, she just told me I had needed to have a better relation, a better relationship with Jesus. She, you know, that I needed to trust Jesus more, you know, and all of these things. I'm like, that's what the guidance counselor told a 14-year-old girl who's getting, you know, bullied and like she was getting bullied. And I'm like, so I so we get we do the re-entry, you know, meeting, and basically to the guidance counselor and a different administrator sit there and tell my child, you know, hey, we did, you know, we did some other seating arrangements, and you just need to give these kids a wide birth. What does that mean? Yeah, just don't talk to them, don't, you know, don't get into it with them, just leave them alone. And I was like, okay, so my husband and I get in the car and I'm like, I was really uneasy. I was like,

Pressure For Therapy And Privacy

SPEAKER_00 24:38

that's weird. Oh, and then she's the guidance counselor. This is the part, this was the the worst part. She's like, So have you gotten in touch with, you know, a mental health therapist? And I said, Well, you know, I kind of started to look around for a you know a mental health therapist, and I said, But you know, I I've talked to my child in a lot, and she's like, Well, we really need to get you get her into a with a therapist, and then I said, Okay, and then what happens after that? And they were like, She was like, Well, then I will work with the therapist to work with your with your child, and it's it's just like in the book where they have you know, like the school counselor is talking to the help, you know, the other counselor, and they're deciding what and when is the learning happening? When is the history and the math and you know, when is the education piece of it happening? Well, give her help or give, you know, coping skills. And she said, she said, we have lots of other students that have you know these this situation where I talk to their therapist and we decide different mechanisms and coping skills and a bunch of I don't even know what. And I said, Well, I'm still trying to find someone again. You know, all of the therapists are you know full, thank goodness. So in the next two weeks, I get four emails saying, I really need you to have, you know, I need to, I need the no to know the therapist, I need to know the therapist, and then I need you to sign something so I can work with the therapist. Well, my husband's like, no, we're not doing it because I am very, I'm pretty like, oh, the expert said it, I gotta do it, you know? Yeah. I mean, I was, and so I got I'm getting nervous thinking about it because I'm such a a you know people pleaser. So anyway, I my husband and I we were like, no. So we emailed the school and said we are going to handle this privately and prayerfully, and we are not we're not going to divulge her private medical information.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

Right, because I was thinking there's there's uh the patient doctor privacy thing, right? So why would the school counselor have any access to that at all? They can't discuss your daughter's situation with a counselor, yeah. But that's what she wanted you to sign.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

Yes, yes, and we I would we wouldn't do it. And we got an email the next day that said, okay, well, that is fine for the rest the safety and of the rest of the student body. If she causes a disruption in the future, we will insist that she has a therapist and that we work with her. And I said, I I my I was at work, I was working as a like a co-teacher at a preschool. My husband's car was in the shop in the shop, and I said, I had to like excuse myself, call him, because he'd gotten this email too, and I had to call him and say, do not call them. We'll talk about it when I get home. Because I have never seen him so angry. And I was, I was, I couldn't believe it that they had taken this stance because they were trying to compel us to put her in therapy, and we had paid them. That was the worst part. We had paid them, and all when she went back into school after she'd been out for two days, all the kids were teasing her that she'd been in the the juvenile psych ward. It's called Lakeside in Memphis. I didn't even know what it was called there, and yeah, they had were like, Hey, how was your stay in Lakeside? It was horrible, and I couldn't believe it had happened to us, to a child who was not a troublemaker, who, you know, hadn't done any of this stuff, and like they were dealing with some very serious, the other kids were dealing with some very other, you know, some serious, heavy home life situations, and this is the hill that they wanted to stand on because two other children reported that my daughter had said this, and so we emailed and said, We're withdrawing them, we're withdrawing them immediately, you know.

Withdrawing Both Kids From School

SPEAKER_00 28:45

My older daughter did go for another week. She didn't want to withdraw immediately because she's like, I'm in 10th grade, I'm in high school. I don't wanna, you know, just it was so jarring, it was such a jarring perspective shift. I could it was like the worldview, just I couldn't believe it because you know I had bought into all of the to the whole thing, you know, oh you gotta do it like this, you gotta do it like this. If you do it the right way and do what the experts say, it's gonna work out great. And it was such a farce. It was such, it was just, it was still upsetting. It's two and a half years later.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

And I still can't just per anyone listening. The book that you were talking about from Abigail Schreier is called Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. And that was part of the reel that I said on Instagram too, was that I, you know, I just saw that my friend was reading this book, and as we kind of opened to the page, it was she was giving an example from an SEL, an actual lesson for I wanna say it was like, I don't know, say seventh graders, somewhere around there. And it was saying, You're gonna go home and pretend to be a spy on your family, and but you're not gonna let them know what you're doing, and you're gonna report back to the school, and it's gonna be like a fun little project. And you know, she took this from an actual SEL curriculum, and the the whole overlying or overarching theme here is that the schools know better. Now, if your daughter actually was going to hurt herself, of course you would want the schools to let you know, but the fact is that they are not even trusting you as the parents to make the right decisions for her. It is, well, this is what we say has to be done for her, and that's kind of where it's like broken. Oh, well, we heard these kids say that she said this and we're just taking that as fact. Obviously, if she was actually going to do something, the parents would be the first ones to act upon that and make sure that that doesn't happen, but they don't even care. And in there weren't even policies. It's not even just like these are our policies, we're sorry, but we have to follow them. They didn't even have policies, they're just making them up.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

And yeah, the it all they really are just taking it out of the parents' hands and saying, You don't know anything, we know better. This is how it must be handled. And so did you homeschool her from then forward? What happened?

SPEAKER_00 31:04

Yeah, so for the so it's right around spring break time when we took them out, and I'll never forget this. I think about it quite a bit, but like I said, my youngest daughter had never loved school, it was always a fight to do homework, she just never wanted to do it. She she's brilliant, and both my kids are very smart, and but you know, my other daughter could do school really well. My other my younger daughter just did not like it. It was boring, she did not find it interesting, and that kind of thing. So I called her down and I said, What if you don't go back to school? It was like close to spring break. I said, What if you don't go back to school? And she said, You mean like until after spring break? I said, like ever again, and I'll never forget the look on her face. I might cry, it was so sweet. She's like, This would be the best day of my life.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Yeah. And so I said, Okay, we're not going back. I couldn't send her back. I I couldn't send her back. And so my mom, she was like, What do you mean you're gonna homeschool? What about socialization? You know, right now, you know, my youngest child was 14, you know, my older daughter was 17, so I'm like, they're fine, they they can socialize, all that kind of thing. And so when I read my e the email that we got to my mom, who's you know a boomer or whatever, she's like, Oh yeah, you can't send her back there. They are looking for a reason to get rid to, you know, get rid of her, whatever. So for the first six weeks for sure, we just did a letdown, and you know, she just you we just did unschool de schooling, de-schooling, and by that time, my older daughter decided she didn't want to go either. And I said, You can choose if you want to complete, you know, stay in tenth grade and finish out the year, or what do you want to do? And she's like, Yeah. She went for a week and then she's like, Nah, I'm gonna withdraw too. I said, Okay, and so after about six weeks, I was like, Okay, what are we gonna do?

Deschooling And A Tennessee Umbrella School

SPEAKER_00 32:57

So, my I so then I tried to recreate school at home. Like, I even emailed the school and said, you know, what are you using? What's your curriculum? They were using like Bob Jones University, I don't know what that is, but like a Becca, and I also reached out to the one friend, one family friend that we had that had home always homeschooled their kids, and they were in Kentucky, and so I got online on YouTube to learn about, you know, what am I gonna do now? And in Tennessee, the you have to have an umbrella school, that's pretty much the only regulation, it's pretty easy, and so I found an umbrella school. They just you know, they take care of the transcripts and stuff, and I'm like, because I was a nervous wreck. Like, I thought the police were gonna knock on our door and say, Hey, where's your daughter? And what what are they getting in biology? I just didn't know it. It just was very counter for me to have just pulled them out in the middle of the year. Nobody knocked on our door because it's allowed. So we just did that for months, to be honest, just months, because my kids could read, they could do math, they could write, and I'm like, what am I gonna do with these kids? You know, my oldest daughter was 17, so she got a job, that kind of thing. So, and my oldest daughter wants to be a an educator, and I said, Okay, let's let's do that. But I really tried to do public, you know, like school at home, and I was like, that's not working. We tried several different curriculums and online curriculums, and some of them were so dry, and I you know, I we just kind of took a breath, but in the the other component of that is we had lived in Memphis for about nine years at that time, and I right after we took the kids out of school, I t I told my husband I wanted to move back to Indiana where we were raised and where all of our family lives. And he was like, Okay, you know, he he'd been wanting to move back, but he wouldn't have done it because I hadn't said, you know, I want to move back. And so in that season, that was a lot ended up being a very long season, it took us about 18 months to sell our house. So that's a long time to be in a limbo situation with you don't want to get kids involved in anything if we're gonna be uprooting them, you know, in a year or two. So, or you know, in a month or two, we thought at the time it would be a month or two, but it wasn't, it was 18 months. So, and in the area around Memphis, they don't have what we call like co-ops, like in Indiana, you have co-ops and you go that kind of thing. In that area, they have like micro schools or tutorials, and you know, it was like $2,000 to to do that. And I was like, you know, you don't get your money back if you leave the middle of the year, so it was very difficult to figure out what do my kids need as young adults. You know, my dot my oldest daughter turned 18 during this period, and what do they need for you know to be prepared for life? And what does my younger daughter need? And so we just focused on more life skills, you know, like financial literacy, don't take out debt, you know. Do you what do you want to do with your life? And we curated it to what they, you know, what they are interested in and what they want to do. And so, because my my oldest daughter now is in community college, taking her general ed classes, and I said, Okay, what do you do when you're you know out of high school and you need to learn how to do something? You now you get online and you learn how to do something, you know. Yeah, and so you know, we talked a lot about what does she need. Okay, she might have a gap in, I don't even know, I you know, and some skill. Okay, well, you can learn that online, but she's doing really well. She's got two jobs now. We moved back to Indiana in July of 2025, and she's got two jobs. She's enrolled, you know, at community college, she's doing great.

Life Skills Jobs Co-op And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 36:55

My youngest daughter is in a co-op, has been, you know, did a co-op this year when we got back. We got involved in a co-op. So we're kind of I'd say similar to Janae Daniels, we're eclectic homeschool homeschoolers, unschoolers. My youngest daughter wants to do cosmetology, is what she w thinks she wants to do, and a skill like that. So I said, okay, you know, we've looked at at beauty college. You can start beauty college, you know, after 10th grade at 16, and she'll be 17 in August, so she might go to beauty college starting in you know, when she's 17. You know, we do a lot of community uh volunteering and community work. They're involved in their church group. Uh my youngest daughter is, and I'm like, what kind of skills do you need? What kind of rhythm do you need to be focused on? And a routine, you know, not a rhythm over a routine because they don't need to learn how to read. They, you know, they know how to read. Believe me, when I saw the literacy and the illiteracy problem, I'm like, do you know what this word is? It's like silhouette and extraordinary. They're like, Yeah, we know how to read. I'm like, okay, they know how to read. Um, they know how to do arithmetic, you know, they know how to count change back at for a job. They know how to com, you know, they're very well-rounded, they're productive members of society. You know, like I could launch them both if they were interested in it. You know, they could both be launched now. So I'm like, okay, this is gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. They're not gonna be, you know, like my age. If you didn't go and get a degree in college, you were gonna live in a van down by the river and just be this, you know, like Chris Sparley. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

Yeah, we don't want that. Right, yeah. I mean, I I I I this is just such an interesting conversation just because of like I love how you saw from the beginning and what it was. And that's you're not, I'm sure, the only story that has to deal with this sort of mean girlness. And when we think of bullying, I feel like we think of like save by the bell and stuffing screech in a locker. Yeah. And it is so different. Ow. Like we can't even if you're like I'm 42, it's hard for me to even understand what bullying is today, other than hearing it from people like you in your situation. Uh, and not every kid has it, but maybe they're the bulliers. Right. Yeah. You know, and I know we were kind of mean in middle school. Like, I remember trying to convince this the pretty girl, oh, you should dye your hair jet black. Because we were like, maybe the boys won't like her then. Yeah. But we didn't force her head under the like a water to do it. I just it's such a different world. And I guess if I could just not scare parents who have kids in the system, but just shed light on to that like this is they have more so taken away parents' rights. And I think that's the point of you wanting to come on the show and why you reached out to me after I had that real where I was talking about social emotional learning in the schools and talking about Abigail Schreier's people. Uh because they are just the government is trying to take away the parents' role, they are trying to break apart the family unit. And I I do talk about that a lot. It probably gets me banned a lot of places. But it is true. And and I was part of it too. Like, yes, here take my child, give them every vaccine. I've never looked into one. I don't care what you're giving them, but you're telling me to do it, so I'm gonna do it. And then now I got a different story, but it does take a lot of research and and like thinking about it in all different ways. And why would someone do this and why would someone do that? And where's the money coming from and where's the money going? And who has the motive, and why are they you know condemning this person and lifting up that person and thinking about it and and really like writing it all down because you have to be confident when you walk into a pediatrician's office, an administration's office, a guidance counselor's office, it takes a lot, and we are so busy today that both parents are usually working, maybe the parents are divorced, and it's like you're just trying to make ends. I mean, you're might be working two jobs, you don't have the time to sit and do this stuff. So if I can like help any parent out, if if your story can help any parent out and give them the knowledge that hey, this stuff's going on, maybe you want to look into it, or maybe we can provide more resources for people. I think it's so important. And I think I'm so happy that you came on to just talk about this today. And it's not to say that every parent needs to remove their kids from the school system, but as long as you're aware it's going on, maybe you can be a little bit more ready to combat it. What

What To Do About Bullying

SPEAKER_01 41:26

would your advice be to a mom or dad whose child is getting bullied in school right now? Take your time, take your time. Yeah, that one is because it sounds drastic or dramatic to be like, just remove them and homeschool them. A lot of people to me it doesn't sound dramatic because I homeschool them. Right, but I um a few years ago I would have been like, What? That's so crazy, you can't just do that. Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:54

I think my advice is if it is and I think other I've I'm sure I've heard other parents talk about this, but if you're feeling like, you know, like you're you're sending your dis your kid to school and you're feeling uneasy about it, because like my daughter didn't come home and say, hey, listen, today this is the bullying. This this is what happened. It was even months later, even now, I'm still a year two years later, I'm still getting she's like, Oh yeah, that happened when I was at school. Because kids don't read this is you know, like this is wrong. This is wrong. You know, there was a lot of things I'd say, you know, try to have an open conversations with your kids because they don't necessarily know, you know, like the SEL. It's so veiled and subtle that they don't realize it because they're children, you know, they're teenage children or whatever. Just have conversations with your kids about, you know, hey, what's going on? Every time I see something on social media, I'm like, did your teacher say this to you? Yes. What happens here stays here. That. And and it even happened at the Christian, in the parochial school. So it's not like, oh, I don't have to worry about that there. You need to know what the policies are and if they're just, you know, coming up with it. Like these administrators were just like Googling, what do we do now? Googling it. Yeah, I know it for a fact. Because I ask them, I ask the guidance counselor, I said, what kind of training do you have? And she said, Oh, I'm about to finish up, you know, a two-year degree with someone on Zoom. Like, I have a not a proctor, but like a mentor. I'm like, have you don't you remember what it was like being a 14-year-old girl? Of course, this girl's gonna say this girl did this, you know, not that kind of thing. And just I think to be aware of what is happening, you know, like what's going on in this in the school, because there is another private school in that area that had a very similar situation where a kid said they might hurt themselves, but they handled it much differently. They let the parents they Let them know this is what happened. Talk to your child. They didn't pull this policy off of Google and say, hey, we gotta do all this stuff because we wanna help co-parent your child. And so I I think just, you know, having an open conversation with your kids about, you know, what's going on at school, what the friends are doing, as much as you can, having, you know, because especially if they have social media or s you know, devices in the schools. Now they have changed the law in Tennessee where you can't, I I don't believe in Tennessee you can have electronics at school, but that's a big component of it. A lot of the bullying is happening online, and it's it's way it's way more intense than I ever realized.

SPEAKER_01 44:44

Yeah, I don't even think we can conceptualize it because we didn't have I didn't have cell phones even in school. They didn't have Facebook until college, and it wasn't used for what it's used for today. Right Snapchat and Instagram, and I don't even know the other social media outlets. But I think what you said that really like kind of shook me too just now was a child can be bullied and not even understand that they're being bullied, they accept it as normal. And it's not to say that you need to like then run out and get the other kid in trouble. That's not what it's about. It's about talking your child through it and how well we don't let people treat us like that. And this would be a good way to combat it. Or you don't have to go there. We can find another school, we can homeschool. You don't have to take this. Um, but if they don't even understand that it's abnormal or wrong, they're not going to come to you and tell you about it because they're probably ashamed, embarrassed, and feeling like there's something wrong with them, but also the social emotional learning component, the fact that your daughter is saying, like, yeah, the teachers say that to us. What say what's said here stays here, and yeah, that is bizarre too. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Thinking back to my days in school, I don't remember any of that.

SPEAKER_00 45:56

No, I I don't remember knowing anything about my teachers.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

I said this I always say the same thing, and people come back at me like, Well, you know if they're married or not. And I'm like, I don't even really think I did. Like, I assumed they were. Maybe somebody would talk about a son in college, but no, I didn't know anything. They didn't have pictures up of their family, nothing. I did not know anything about any of my teachers. One one teacher, she wasn't even my teacher, but her daughter was in my grade. So I knew that lady had a sure, but that's it. And yes, now they're telling them. I just shared something the other day. A teacher was like, Well, if I don't have a husband or a boyfriend, that means I'm in the class yells out a lesbian. Yeah. They were third graders.

SPEAKER_00 46:38

Yeah, yes, yes, and it's like uh it's it's very upsetting. My my husband was in high school in the 80s. Okay, so you know, like the land before time, the time before. We always tease him about that. But he said, I asked him, I said, Did you know anything about because I saw that what that reel of yours? And I'm like, Did you know anything about your teachers? And he's like, No, I didn't want to know anything. And he said, in fact, the female teachers wanted to be called Ms. because we they didn't want us to know if they were married or not.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

Imagine that.

SPEAKER_00 47:12

Yeah, I said, let's go back to that. I don't need to know anything about your personal life to treat you the right way. I don't need to know anything about you know, anything like that. And so, like, how did we get here?

SPEAKER_01 47:27

And that's what it is. At the end of the day, why would a third grader need to know who their teacher s has sexual relationships with in bed that night? Right. Don't they don't need to know it, it has nothing to do with math, writing, or reading or science or history, so therefore they don't have to know it. Leave it up to the parents. Right, yes. Yeah. Oh my goodness, Allie, is there anything else that you want to make sure that you share today before we round out the hour?

SPEAKER_00 47:55

No, just thank you so much for taking the time to have me on. I've been wanting to tell this story, our story of you know, what happened to us because I was so surprised. I I really did not ever think this would happen to us. And I did think that I had a level of protection sending my kids to a private school and paying them. And I had how what the situation was. And so thank you so much for having me on.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Absolutely. Can I ask you one last question? Yes. How different do you see your daughter's personality or just her, you know, stance on life from when she was in school to now?

Living In Color After Leaving School

SPEAKER_00 48:31

It is like a she's like a different person. She's like, she's so much more vibrant, and it's like when you get a black have a black and white TV and then you go to color, or you go, you know, yeah, it really is. And that's why we did de-schooling for so long because it happened gradually over time, and you know that that is really the hardest age, those middle like 12 pre-adolescence to after, those are the most difficult times, I think, really, of the your whole life. Because yeah, things change so much, and you don't really understand what's happening, it's just very difficult and it can be so challenging. And it's like she lives in color now, she's vibrant, and I have to tell her, I still have to remind her, I'm like, your new friends, your new homeschool friends, that most of them have been homeschooled since they were very young, always. I said, they're not going to hurt you the way all of these other kids hurt you because it had been going on. I mean, it wasn't just this school, like she had she had both of my girls had very heavy, you know, situations through the whole time they were in school. My youngest daughter saw an explicit photo from another first grader when they were seven. She showed it to her at school.

SPEAKER_01 49:51

At school. Did you learn about it at that time?

SPEAKER_00 49:53

No, I just learned about it at like a few months ago. Because think about you don't want to tell your mom, hey, I saw this picture, you know. And so she told me that because I've been asking her more questions, and I'm like, yeah, and she said that happened when she was seven. Um, there were other pornography. Yes, it didn't happen just once. This one child in first grade, it happened like constantly. I will tell you this, Cheryl, this happened at the the school that closed down. They had iPads for tech and they had a Bible app because they did Bible apps. One of the kids in my other daughter, my older daughter's class was using the iPad Bible app, messaging strangers on the internet, taking it into the bathroom at school and sharing n nudes with the school's iPad, and she was a minor. It was a girl, yeah, sharing herself to others, like messaging other just strangers.

SPEAKER_01 50:53

You could message strangers in the Bible app. So and I have to, I do have to wrap it up, but okay, this this there's a woman who runs a page on Instagram. She's always delving into this sort of thing, and I remember s her saying, I went into my third graders, and hopefully she homeschools now. I mean, Jesus. Right? I went into my third grader's classroom, I picked up the iPad, and I went on, and I was able to talk to strangers on it. And I asked the teacher why. And the teacher wasn't even aware that this was possible. But the kids knew it, the kids found it out. I would not have even believed that that was real. But like you would not believe these things were happening, but they are. But oh my god, and now with AI, it's like, holy crap, just homeschool them, just keep them home. You can't do worse, you cannot do worse. Reach for them every day and do some math and science. You're good. Yes, exactly. Ellie, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much. If you guys want to follow Ellie, I will put um all of your information in the show's description so people can reach out to you if they have questions or find you and hear more about your story. Thank you so much. Thank you.

How To Support The Show

SPEAKER_01 52:06

Thank you for listening to the Homeschool How To Podcast. If today's episode helped you, please be sure to follow the show and leave a review. It's the best way to support the podcast. And if you're just getting started or need a reset, head to thehomeschoolhowto.com and grab my free 30-day homeschool quick start guide. Until next time, keep learning, keep questioning, and thank you for your love of the next generation.