This is a personal post about where Moxie is in her educational journey and all the feeings that come along with this Moxie starts high school in August. She’s had a solid run at her intermediate school. Her sixth-grade elementary teachers really saw her—they believed in her and recognized her strengths. Thanks to their advocacy, Moxie was placed in what’s called “General Special Ed.” I’m not sure how things work where you are, but here in Hawaiʻi, our district uses four tracks: Honors, General Ed, General Special Ed, and Segregated (or “Fully Self-Contained”). General Special Ed tends to be a mix—students with various disabilities or behavioral differences. Segregated classrooms are typically where students with more significant intellectual or developmental disabilities are placed. In my experience, students with Down syndrome are almost always placed in the Segregated track. I’ve never seen anyone with Down syndrome placed in General Special Ed. But Moxie’s teachers advocated for her, and she landed in General Special Ed—with the best Special Ed Coordinator I’ve ever encountered. He was phenomenal—genuinely committed to understanding and supporting her. He made a massive difference. He and the school administration even allowed me to quietly observe her classes. That may not sound like much, but it was huge—especially in contrast to her elementary school, where parents weren’t even allowed on campus, much less in classrooms. Through those observations, I got to witness her agency. Moxie knows what she wants. She had her priorities: time with her favorite teacher and lunch. She was consistently late to the class she didn’t care about—because it just wasn’t important to her. I also saw that, while students were friendly on the surface, she didn’t have any actual friends. She was almost always alone. I cried over that. But Moxie didn’t. There were some truly outstanding teachers in her intermediate school. That said, the school counselor missed a lot of opportunities to create meaningful peer connections. As someone who’s both a counselor and an educator, that was hard for me to stomach. Still, the support she did have, and the general vibe of acceptance, seemed to land well with her. And now: high school. I’ve been scared silly about it—honestly, I think with good reason. Her assigned high school consistently scores poorly. There are limited academic or extracurricular options for students in general, and even fewer for students with intellectual disabilities. Most students like Moxie are automatically placed in a segregated, Fully Self-Contained class. What I’ve seen from those settings is disheartening. The focus is often on “life skills,” which seems to mean things like picking up trash on campus or coloring worksheets. Many students are visibly bored, disengaged, and, frankly, not treated with respect. It feels more like a care facility than a place for learning or growth. Moxie will be in General Special Ed again—but there’s still so much we don’t know. Her path forward feels hazy. One hopeful note: she started a summer bridge program today—something designed to help incoming students get familiar with the high school environment. We’ll see how that goes. This morning, as I sat at my desk, I was taken back to when I was pregnant with Moxie. I remember the worries, the grief, the not knowing. I remember being afraid she would experience the same pain, isolation and abuse I did, growing up with disabilities. I questioned whether it was right to bring a child with Down syndrome into a world that can be so ableist. And in that uncertainty while pregnant with her, I found deep comfort in Khalil Gibran’s poem “On Children”: And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.And he said:Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.They come through you but not from you,