School issue update

Last spring I ran into a problem with my 9 year old at her school. Someone was bothering her, and would not stop, so she threatened him. The principal at the school started punishing her by putting her into the school's isolation booth between 2 to 6 hours at a stretch, which I objected to. When the threat included saying she was going to go after the kid with a knife, the principal suspended her (even though there was no knife). In March the principal called me in and told me that she was going to ask for a "Risk Assessment" to determine if my 9 year old girl was a threat to the other children at the school. She also called for a psychological evaluation. The results of this was that my girl has a depressive disorder which she externalizes as primarily defensive agression. The Risk Assessor reported that the girl was more of a danger to herself than to others. The principal was told to create and use a behavior plan in order to monitor and control the girl's outbursts and not to put her into isolation.  When school started in September, the principal had not only not created any kind of plan, but was not altering her treatment of the girl whatsoever, completely ignoring the report of the risk assessment from the prior spring. Although my girl was no longer placed in the school's isolation booths but in the nurses' office, she was still isolated after any minor incident. Upon her 2nd suspension from school in 6 weeks, I called the superintendent's office in an attempt to get the girl transferred into the other school in the district in hopes that a new start would solve the problem. The problem is that each time my girl is involved in any kind of argument, she is punished and the other child involved is told to tell on my girl. Each and every minor disruption of class, and my girl is taken out of the class and put into isolation for the rest of the day, no matter how minor the incedent. During the last incident, my girl disrupted the class because she was upset. She was sent to the principal's office, put into isolation in the nurses's office, and the principal interviewed all the other children in the class, as if she were trying to dig up enough dirt on the girl to justify suspending her. She went over days of behavior, and claimed that some of the other children claimed that a few days prior she had threatened them with a knife. Well, first there is no knife. There never was a knife. The one and only "knife" reference that my girl made at all (for which she was suspended the first time) was "what you say you are going to do to me I'm going to do to you but I'm going to use a knife". The principal denied that this was a defensive statement. By the time that I arrived to pick my girl up from school that Thursday she was so upset that it took me 5 days to get her calmed down again. She was practically psychotic for 3 days. So, on Monday I called both the Superintendent and the Risk Assessor I had delt with in the spring. The next call that I got, a few days later, was from the principal, who told me that the Superintendent agreed with her that transferring my girl would not solve the problem, and that he had agreed with her that my girl should keep getting suspended, in increasing durations, to curb the behavior.  I told the principal that I did not want my girl put into isolation at all, because when she is in there she just gets worked up more and that I did not feel that my girl was safe in her care.  When I got the write up of the incident from the principal in the mail, it was worded as if all the supposed behavior had happened that day, even though she had told me on the phone when she informed me that my girl was once again suspended that these things had happened over the course of a couple of days. It occurred to me that if the thing was building up over days, why wasn't something done about it prior to this point?  A few days later I got a call from the risk assessor, who told me that the only reason that my girl wasn't being transferred was because the other classes were already over full. That she had had a talk with the principal, and convinced her that since her current tactics were not working that they needed to try something different, and that she should have been following a behavior plan.  Well, things have been calm for a few weeks now, but I have no confidence that they are going to stay that way. I have been assured that someone is going to be monitoring the class so that they can determine what is triggering the bad behavior and that a behavior plan, which does not include excessive isolation, is going to be put in place to solve this problem.  It has taken me weeks, and a visit to the doctor to get an anti-anxiety prescription, to get over the extreme anger over this situation. Some of the treatment that my girl has received at this school borders on abuse, and when I think back to the timing of the incidents, the worst behavior I have had to deal with at home coincide quite a bit with some of the incidents that I was unaware had happened at the time but learned about during the risk assessment last spring. My girl is in counseling, but this is her 3rd counselor here - the first one I had to fire, the second one got a promotion (but was quite unreliable anyway), and this one seems very nice, but child counseling is an iffy thing, at best. It takes so long for the counselor to get to know the child and for the child to trust the counselor that it can be months before any progress can be made at all. It is really more on my shoulders, because I spend every day with her and retraining those bad habits she picked up in foster care (and, honestly, from her mother) is a difficult task. I've made a lot of progress, mind you, but when her school life is so miserable, it takes us back quite a bit.  All in all, living in this area is not working out for either of us, between the lack of available services to the lack of available jobs and social activities. I have some tough decisions to make, to improve both of our lives to the point where the depression is not such a huge factor in our lives.