ONE mom says it felt like extortion.
Another said she was scared to death.
The third says she took her son out of school to save his life.
These are some of the parents coming out with their horror stories about public-school educators who have pressured and coerced them into medicating their kids.
Joyce Cava, 40, of Queens, charges her son Bryan, 11, was held back in the fourth grade even though he passed his statewide reading and math test because she resisted pressure from school officials to medicate.
“It was extortion,” said Cava, who felt the pressure to medicate from Middle Village school officials for an entire school year.
The school accused Bryan of having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but Cava’s own pediatrician said he was normal. School officials allegedly told Cava her son was held back because he had behavior problems.
“I was falling apart,” Cava said. “They don’t have a right to do this.”
Lori Phelen, also of Queens, isn’t taking any chances and reluctantly keeps her two sons, Robert, 11, and Sean, 7, on a battery of medication.
She said classmates have nicknamed Robert the “Medicine Man.”
“I’m like a pharmacy here,” said Phelen, who took her sons off the drugs two years ago.
“I was afraid that if I didn’t put them on the medications, they were going to call [the Administration for] Children Services,” Phelen said.
Schools Chancellor Harold Levy said he could not discuss individual cases because of confidentiality rules, but promised to investigate the complaints.
In Westchester County, Maria Vargas, 34, charges one local public school banned her son Nelvis, 8, from attending classes because she refused to give him a psychotic-inducing cocktail of Ritalin and other drugs prescribed by a school-based doctor.
When she complained about her son’s behavior and health, “The school doctor just prescribes more medicine,” Maria Vargas said.
The boy’s father, Nelson Vargas, 41, of Yonkers, thinks he saved Nelvis by removing him from the system and home-schooling him for more than a year.
“I would stay up at night crying,” the father said.
“It was horrible. The drugs kept him awake at nights mumbling to himself. Sometimes, I could hear him saying, ‘Get off me, get off me.’ “
Westchester County school officials were unavailable for comment yesterday.
But parents across the state want you to know the public schools’ “dirty little secret” is out, and they’ll challenge anyone who says the forced medication of kids is a myth.