I attended 5th grade at an elementary school in Taylorsville, which is in the Granite School District. My teacher was very kind to me and didn't show any discrimination to my face, I don't know if there was anything behind the scenes. However, there was an experience where the principal called my mom and told her to take her kids out of their school. She asked why and was told that another child, a DCCS member, was getting into trouble at their school. My mom told them that it wasn’t her child, and the principal's response was, "you're all the same." I don't know how the rest of their conversation went but we continued going until the end of the school year. 

This school was very different from any other school I went to. When I first started school here, I didn't have any trouble making friends. Other students treated me how they treated the other students at first. Then I started noticing groups of kids being stand-offish towards me. They seemed like they were saying things about me and avoiding me. I noticed that one of these students' mothers would volunteer at the school and would sometimes help in our classroom. She seemed to notice me and acted differently towards me than she did the other students. I started noticing more and more kids would avoid me and not play with me but never said anything to me. Towards the last half of the school year, I didn't have any friends.

Someone at the school noticed I wasn't playing with any kids, so the school set up a "special program" to help socialize me. They would take me out of class and teach me how to make friends with other kids and would make kids in my class be friends with me. I would have things I was supposed to do every week, then tell them how it went. The next time I had my private class, they would give me the next weeks worth of stuff to do with kids they picked out to be my friends. I knew it was a class set up just for me. One of the kids they would make be my friend was part of the main group that stayed away from me, so I felt awkward pretending to be friends with her. She wasn't that friendly back. My experiences that year changed how I viewed school for the rest of my life. All the recesses that I spent hiding somewhere in the halls so none of the kids saw that I had no friends to play with at recess. Being in a class with all these kids talking about me and looking at me but not knowing what they were saying. As a 5th grader, my mom telling me the phone call she got from the principal and knowing that they didn't want me at their school was very impactful. My view of school never recovered from these experiences.