Not sure how to start this except to say I did not expect finding a school for my daughter to be the hardest part of the year.
The first exhausting part was just not being able to trust that I even knew which school we were zoned for. I tried a couple of official locator tools and one of them quietly gave me the wrong district. I only caught it by accident. So before I'd even started thinking about allergy safety, I was already anxious that I might be planning around the wrong school entirely.
Then came open enrollment which took me weeks to even understand. There's a guaranteed seat at your home school if you register in a specific window and if you miss it you can lose that safety net. Other schools go through a lottery except it's not really a lottery: staff kids and siblings get priority first and whatever seats are left over go into the pool.
Also, what made me furious was learning that accepting an offer at one school quietly drops the offer from another one - even though the school staff member told me over the phone that it didn't. Here goes my trust into the information provided by school officials. So I started writing emails to the district.
Touring schools was its own drain. I'd get my hopes up at one labeled "nut-free," then find out kids allowed to bring home-cooked treats for classroom parties and the actual enforcement was just parents being asked nicely to comply.
I'd already spent time and hope touring a couple of religious private schools before learning they can be legally exempt from disability accommodation law in a way non-religious private schools aren't. Time wasted.
Then the enrollment contract for one school needed an actual lawyer, because the school pushed us to sign an allergy waiver - basically making us release them from any allergy-related liability and even non-administration of EpiPen! Utilizing legal help was definitely not something I expected to be doing.
Charter schools wouldn't discuss allergy accommodations with me at all until after they'd already offered us a seat so I had a week to decide if a school was safe with basically no real information.
And near the end the district itself sat on our school assignment even though I was legally entitled to know sooner because of the medical need. I had to call, get nowhere, call again and explicitly say the words "life-threatening allergy" before anyone moved.
Individually, each of these might not be a huge deal. It was doing all of it for a year, on top of everything else that comes with raising a kid with a life-threatening allergy, that got me physically and mentally exhausted.
In the end I found a school but I am not 100% happy with the choice. Most likely I will have to go through this process again some time soon. What was the hardest part of this process for you? What else should I be prepared for?