What Communities in Schools has Done for Me

I was home schooled and liked being so for the most part. I was home schooled for many reasons. One of which was that I’ve always been a bit of a late bloomer. I was also pretty shy, and the thought of many students and screaming teachers trying to control them scared me to death. I have a July birthday, which meant my parents had to make the choice of whether they would have me doing the work of older kids, or of younger kids. I have two older brothers and I always wanted to be exactly like them. They were doing fourth and sixth grade, but I was just going to do kindergarten, which they told me wasn’t real school. So when my parents asked me what I wanted to do, I said I wanted to start first grade!
First grade was great. I was the champion of addition. As long as the final answer didn’t exceed twelve, I was fine. Once it got to thirteen things got hairy, but in first grade it never went any further. Second, third, and fourth grade went just as well. Fifth grade didn’t go quite so well. My arithmetic struggled while my reading level came to a stand still. I also wrote at a horribly slow pace. Part of the reason is that I would subconsciously write the letters to words out of order, even when I knew how to spell them. After a few years and a comprehension class I started to regain the ground I had lost in my schooling, although I still wrote just as slow.
Not too long ago I realized that one of the reasons for my difficulty with writing was that I had hereditary hand tremors. It amazed me that I hadn’t ever noticed it before, but when I thought back, I realized that it had always been there. I always had to bear down extremely hard to keep my hand from shaking. Around this same time I found out that my problem with not being able to write the letters of words in the correct order had a name: Dysgraphia. I didn’t have any idea that my little problem was both common and known. I thought I just had a weird habit that I couldn’t break.
A few months ago I was hoping I would be able to start my junior year of
high school. Both of my brothers had started going to schools by the time they had reached their junior years, and my mom was unsure if she would be able to teach me. I was unsure if I would be able to take notes during lectures, or if I would even learn anything in a classroom of forty-five kids, with one teacher trying to control them all. Every option we looked into didn’t fit, or we couldn’t afford.
One day my mom told me about a school called Classic City Performance Learning Center, which had been started by a group called Communities in Schools. She told me about how all of the schools started by Communities in Schools, had a fifteen student per classroom rule. She also told me about how almost all of the work is done on computers, and therefore not much note taking. The last thing she told me about was how it is self paced. It sounded like we might have found what I was looking for.
On August seventh two-thousand-eight, I started going to Classic City Performance Learning Center, a Communities in Schools, school. I quickly found out that small number of students, the work being mostly on computer, and the self paced nature was exactly what I needed. I was able to keep up, and even get ahead in some in one class. I have now completed that class and moved on to another, which I’ll be finishing at the time the first class was intended to end. Communities in Schools is not only helping me catch up, but also giving me the chance to get ahead. I am very thankful for Communities in Schools, because I haven’t any idea what I would be doing now if not for them.