Another parent-teacher meeting

On Friday we went to the school in the morning to meet with T's teacher, as per her request. She was saying that he wasn't doing well, still hadn't learned enough German, needed to work harder and so on or he would be held back next year (again already!). She said she has her own students to teach and can't spend time teaching T also. A particularly awkward moment came up when she said he drew a picture in art class of fighting in WWII complete with Nazis and swastikas (which are illegal in Germany)!, and wanted to know why he drew this. We tried our best to explain that he didn't mean anything by it and wasn't aware of how sensitive Germans were about WWII. She had a list of things she wanted us to do, most of it was fair enough, signing off on his homework, making sure his pencil case was in his school bag, ... teach him German cursive this summer (how would we do that? we don't know German cursive). However, at one point the teacher asked me how long we would be here and she seemed to be very surprised when I said 4-5 years (I've encountered this before, people only expect us to be here from ~6 months to a year at most). It is becoming clearer to us that the school has been taking the path of least resistance/convenience with T, moving him down in grades and just tolerating him until we leave, which they apparently expected to happen after about a year. Also, there are very few students that are not local Germans so the school is not used to dealing with kids new to the country. Obviously V and I will have to work harder to make up for this. We discussed finding a high-schooler that we could pay to help T with his homework (in German) after school (also a suggestion of his teacher) and arranging times for him to go visit other kids at their houses so he would be encouraged to use and learn more German that way also, and we need to do some kind of home schooling to keep him up to grade level and not let him fall behind.