by Wayne Cracknell

Created on: July 14, 2010

Recently, my son was kicked out of the local public school system for, what I now know was a completely idiotic and stupid event. He had "threatened" another student, jokingly of course. The student was completely fine with this, knowing my son had been joking and would never hurt his friend, but some other students around him at the time told their parents about the incident. What ensued was both a mockery of the public education system, the intelligence of my son and changed the way I thought about schooling.

The first thing I learned when going through this process with my son was the fact that large school systems just can't function at optimal capacity. My son went to a very large public school with thousands of students. Even though there were people dedicated to getting him thrown out of school, they made a very sloppy job out of it. One thing I noticed immediately is that, although the school had witness statements from the students around my child from the day after the incident, they had never actually bothered to read them as there was no corroboration between them at all. Then at the hearing the man presenting the school's case presented charges that were different than the charges we had been told were being presented. Luckily I had a paper proving that right in front of me, which led to another major blunder by the school, although my son has Asperger Syndrome and it's on record with the school, the presenter knew absolutely nothing about the condition that very well could have caused my son's behavior in the first place.

This mess made me decide to transfer my son into a private academy close to his old school, instead of waiting for the school to even get back to me on their decision. A few months later, it was obvious that I was very impressed with the private school. I was paying a very minimal fee to get my son into this school, and the service I got was great indeed. One of the first thing I noticed was that instead of the sloppy mess the larger school system made of all its students and contact with them, the private school was able to keep me in constant contact with my son's teachers and even the dean. Due to the small class sizes of private schools they are easily able to keep track of all of their students and things become a lot more personal. Compare this to the very corporate like aura of the public school system, and you find a major point against public systems.

Another thing I had noticed after transferring my son into private

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