I’ve had so many wonderful responses and incredible support through sharing the ongoing saga of getting a 504 passed in our school system to legally protect Gillian by setting up rules and parameters to be followed while in school. I’m very grateful for all the support! I’ve also reached parents who’s kids also have Celiac, who didn’t know that their children had rights…being able to actually help people in one way or the other has always been the driving force for me putting it all out here on the web, the good, bad and ugly.

I was prompted to write a response that turned itself into a post, and as I was writing it I realized that an update was needed, because I really left things hanging in the last post about being “outed” in my community through the school system finding links to my site in the process of doing their own homework in helping to prepare our daughter’s 504. I haven’t written for a while, I got a little spooked at the prospect of having my neighbors on the blog, and I suddenly found myself holding back…which is a little silly, especially considering the plethora of past posts in which to peruse (a little alliteration to lighten things up:))  After all, sharing the intimacies of my life with virtual friends puts no risk to my children or my husband. I can handle judgment, if it comes my way, from cyberspace. The possibility of my writings having a direct effect on my kids is a whole different story. I think I was ducking and covering my head to wait and see if the shrapnel was going to hit….but of course things like this don’t explode in upper-middle class suburbs. They spread and mutate, like in a game of ‘Telephone”.  Actually, the diffusion usually happens *during* the adult version of “Telephone”, doesn’t it?

I actually found out that the school board had found our blog through checking my stats, and seeing the search strings from search engines that had been clicked through to our site on in the week before our meeting. There are certainly a lot of blogs (and topic specific) sites out there, 99% of which are much more informative than my own, limited to my experiences with Gillian. This is why I found the whole thing remarkable. I believe they clicked through to this site because my name – and Gillian’s – were visible in the blurb below the titles that were displayed. Through the search strings, they were clicking directly onto our posts about Celiac and 504 plans.

I doubt they were searching blogs specifically, I’m assuming they were looking for information on how to handle a 504 for a medical issue that is totally new to the school system, and applaud them for educating themselves on how to help Gillian. There were a lot of questions about whether the Americans with Disabilities Act applied to Celiac. I’d also handed them the 504 that is supplied on many of the Celiac-specific sites (I posted the one we’d personalized to her), and told them that this is the standard 504 that is being passed all over the country, and perhaps they were checking on that as well. These, of course, are speculations, but I’m quite certain that they weren’t looking for us specifically. They’d have no reason to do so. Someone happened upon our blog, and then there were a lot of someones happening upon it in the following days:)

No one from the district has said a word to us about our religion. I didn’t think they would. Things don’t happen that way in the suburbs…I’ve been waiting for the bomb to drop slowly, as it trickles down through the PTO. I’ve got friends in the community to ask about this, and I dropped an email to a well-connected friend today to ask if she’s heard anything. Our religion has not been mentioned to us directly – I’d assumed it wouldn’t be – and has not had an effect on the way Gillian’s case is being handled. I would certainly not expect it to, one has nothing to do with another. Even if the entire school board were religious zealots of some sort – which of course is not the case – it shouldn’t have anything to do with the proceedure of setting up Gillian’s in-school plan.

In the ‘fishbowl’ of a sports club in town several years ago, it became common knowledge that we were Wiccan because of a slip of my tongue in casual conversation. Luckily, many of the members were not from our community, and the ones that were had known me through the club for several years. Since the slip had occurred, I attempted to make myself available and approachable about the subject so that there would be less of the common misconceptions passed around. It worked both in my favor, and against it. A few people (who are the ones involved in our school system politics) knew us well enough to not judge, and were open and interested, curious, but not put off. These are the people I need to reach out to, they will let me know if and when our religion becomes an item of interest in the community. There were others who were actually approaching other members in the gym with concern that our family would put curses on them, and cast spells to control them. Luckily, word got back to me quickly through my acquaintances, and I was able to help minimize the damage at the time, with the help of the allies we’d made. This knowledge never got passed to the ’school set’ at large, and the incident passed. If it were to reemerge in the school system at large, the potential damage to the children is much greater…this isn’t a sports club with a hundred members.

We’re still waiting for a document to be put forth that can be agreed upon by both us and the school district, and that may actually happen soon – we’re waiting on the letter from the doctor they sent us to for a second opinion before offering their revisions. The school system seems to be finally working with us to institute the 504.

Although I know some on the school board now know we’re Wiccan, I’m hoping that at this point there’s more religious tolerance than there would have been several years ago. I’m hoping that our privacy in the community will be respected (although that may be too much to ask for, considering I bare it all on the web), and if not, that people will come to me and ask questions, or take the time to educate themselves on the details of our nature-based religion.

So, the long and short of it is that we’re still not aware of the long-term ramifications of members of the school board finding out about us, or if this information will be disseminated through the community. Believe me, if a witch-hunt starts around here, I’ll be blogging about it, but I’d like to think that diversity has infiltrated life in the suburbs enough to make a difference. In the meantime, I’m going to channel Anne Frank, and believe with all my being that people are really good at heart:)

When I know, you’ll know:)