Constructing Kasun, Educator

I had lunch and extensive adult-life conversation, including swapping coastal stories of how to buy a mortgage with a colleague and friend from my former life working in Mexico.  She currently teaches social studies to middle school students in Seattle.  Her partner asked what we had talked about over brunch (we met while he finished a late sleep), and I explained we had solved middle schools’ problems in the US.  Trouble is, we forgot to take notes.  Here’s the best I can remember.

Steph explained that her middle school students are just beginning to enter that awful phase of choosing whether or not to be jumped into gangs.  At her school, about 70% live in poverty.  About 16% of her students are Latino, and only about 9% are white, she said (the rest are Asian and African American).  As the Latino students population has recently risen over the last couple years, so has the black and brown tension–a phenomenon that either lurked under the surface or hardly existed until now.  Furthermore, she keeps waiting for her district to respond to the steep rise in gang recruitment… despite her letters to her superintendent.  She is hopeful that a couple community meetings being held this summer may bear some fruit.

“We have so many kids skipping now… and the 6th graders have learned it from the 8th graders–what do we do?”  I was encouraged to learn that few of her fellow teachers are of the gripe and moan ilk, e.g., “It’s because they come here and don’t want to learn.”  Rather, they want to know how they can be effective in communicating with families at home instead of ineffective.  The teachers, unlike most of the students, tend to be white.  Well-intentioned, not fully equipped–and they’re wise enough to sense it.

Ah, so close to the University of Washington, and yet, so far… Multicultural education rockstar theorists are there–James A. Banks and Geneva Gay.  And yet, where is the university in this?  Far, far away, it seems (of course these people can’t be everywhere–we know that–but they’re SO CLOSE).  It’s true–she teaches in a district that borders Seattle proper, but she’s encouraged that it is small enough to implement change without heavy layers of bureaucracy.  Nonetheless, when she complains about these issues, she is tasked, along with the one other Spanish speaking staff member at her school, of serving on the committees to solve the problems.  Her principal is proactive, she says, but one wonders how long this principal will be there.  ”We go through cycles of awful principal, clean-up principal, awful one, awful one, great one, awful one.”

The same problems.  Crisis of leadership, teachers who want to do well, but don’t know how, children with curricula that leave them preferring to skip school, enough alienation from school community that kids would rather be beaten into gangs.  It’s a common story, and, yet, we in the US still don’t have even adequate answers. 

I guess the good news is that Steph, and so many passionate teachers, still have their hearts and skills invested in the kids.  And that counts for so much, but I fear it’s not enough. 

It’s Sunday morning, and I received a response from a coworker in my district about a student who I am trying to refer for special education services.  I have a professional relationship with this individual and I respect her work, and I’m stuck here wondering about my response to her email on a non-work day, one where I have a small luxury of time to contemplate.

Here’s the backstory.  My student, “Claudia,” (not her real name) is an incredibly well-behaved, kind student at one of my sites of alternative education.  After a few sessions with her (like all my students, I see her once a week), I realized that her reading comprehension abilities are low, especially relative to beautiful fluency when she reads.  When I try to scaffold understanding in a story to a past event in the story, it feels like shooting at fish in a pond.  Rarely do I hit the target with techniques that work with other students (who are also developing as readers).  Furthermore, when I try to get her to empathize with characters, I can’t find any wide range of emotions from prior experiences in this student’s life.  I look in all directions and find find few cognitive pegs on which to hang understanding with her. 

Her teachers who work with her every day echo similar concerns, so I decided I would take the next step with a student who doesn’t learn the “NORMAL” way, and that is a referral for consideration for special education.

I’ve referred several students in the past and am familiar with the Byzantine and seemingly smoke-and-mirrors process of helping get a student additional support (often hinging upon dominant personalities involved in local screening committees and their subjective backgrounds, biases, and experiences).

So, here’s a thumbnail sketch of the process of referring an ESOL student for special education:

Submit the 8 to 20 pages of forms necessary and supporting evidence to my district’s Dual Language Assessment (DLA) team.  Wait for a couple months (sometimes six or seven if the summer is involved… and then maybe watch the kid get lost if she transfers schools or moves from middle to high school).  The DLA is completed, and if they suggest that there may be something amiss with the way the student learns, the Local Screening Committee (LSC) meets.    Submit a new round of paperwork all over again to the LSC before they meet, and sometimes learn after the meeting that the committee met and they failed to invite you.  If the LSC can be convinced that this student has learning issues beyond the regular difficulties of learning another language (and this is often a heated debate where polarized sides get angry and frustrated and don’t really hear each other out), then the second battery of testing is ordered.  Next, a couple months may pass between the testing and the next meeting of the LSC.  The LSC then decides whether or not the testing indicates that a student should receive special education services.  And then ANOTHER meeting is set later on to write the student’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) describing which additional services a student may receive and what goals are to be set for the student’s achievement.  The amount of time involved for the original referring ESOL teacher is now up to about 20 hours of work in between checking in on the special education office to make sure they’re following up on the child and scheduling meetings and making sure they remember to invite the ESOL teacher to meetings.  The fastest I’ve ever seen this process work is about six months.  I’ve seen it drawn out over two academic years. 

Back to my email from this morning.  It had taken me a couple months to submit the original referral for “Claudia,” because I didn’t know exactly what to write.  The form itself is intimidating and cold.  Have a look at my district’s forms (not unlike most school districts’ forms)http://www.fcps.edu/ss/linkedfiles/se5.pdf http://www.fcps.edu/ss/linkedfiles/se5a.pdf

Students suddenly become broken down into symptoms and problems, and the teacher takes a cold clinician’s eye toward the “interventions and duration of interventions” and records them.  So this warm child who is a responsible worker in the afternoons with her mom at a salon, who smiles everytime she sees you, who worries about her friend who has an abusive boyfriend, is suddenly reduced to “problems and interventions.”  I don’t deny the need to be methodic in considering how we work with students, but this clinical approach is deadening and reductionist.  There’s so much I want to say about “Claudia,” and yet the form kills the life in both my student and in me as I approach the boxes, acronyms, and bold letters on the forms.

My colleague’s email was suddenly a real, living conversation about this child… and it was only about attempting to get a home phone number for the girl’s mother (the one listed no longer works).  But I found myself wanting to spill my thoughts and worries, our tiny victories as teacher and student, with this woman who had tested “Claudia” this week.  I felt relieved that the tester demonstrated in her email that Claudia was a living child, not a clinical piece of evidence. 

I breathe deeply and hope we achieve seeing the students’ humanity in our jobs as educators, beyond the layers of legal paperwork and bureacracy.  And hopefully we breathe life back into our work and into the children in education.

“Life is cheap in the Third World.”  An old friend and I used to share this sentiment back in the days when we studied the concept of development in what we often refer to as the Third World.  We looked at high infant mortality rates, lack of access to health care and education and came to this grim conclusion.  He was from that part of the world; I had lived in it.   We traveled through some of it together and felt some consolation in this reductionist refrain as we dismissed the smudged-faced beggar children who pulled at our pant legs.

After a few days working in my new position with the least likely to succeed in this society, I have to come to the same conclusion about the First World as well, at least the US as part of the First World.  Life is cheap here, too.  So many of these people around us, even in this country of abundant resources and highly developed infrastructure, are tossed away like rotten meat, forgotten on the garbage heap of wasted human potential, abandoned and dismissed.

Last week I went to a mental health facility for children who have problems with substance abuse; all of the kids there have both a mental disorder and problems with substance abuse.  My colleagues took me there, as it’s one of my many sites on my list.  They didn’t think I’d have any ESOL students to service, but they said it would be good for me to know what those sites were like.  And the place isn’t bad.  It’s an old house on fairly spacious grounds with woods in the back.  The furniture is a little old and dirty, but not worse than some of the furniture I used in my dorm rooms in college.

The kids came up the stairs from their classroom in the basement for a break while we were there.  And, guess what?  They seemed like normal kids, helping themselves to water from the refrigerator, joking, talking with each other.  I didn’t expect anything different.  But somewhere these kids have been given up on, or they wouldn’t be in that home.  It turns out I will work with one of them—a young man from
Mexico, I think. 

At another mental health site that afternoon, we visited a house that is almost primarily for girls who don’t have a place to live.  There was only one resident at the time we visited, an American girl, working on large Matisse-like cutouts.  She was using another piece she had colored as a model which had peace symbols on it and a large gravestone that said, “Daddy, Rest in Peace.”  She was thin, tall, drawn into herself, and fragile.  Those chestnut eyes darted back and forth from the shapes she was cutting to glances at us, the strange visitors.  Her teacher kept telling her to rip the cutouts instead of cutting them, and the girl got angry at this (I would have, too!).  I just wanted to hug her, tell her it was ok, adopt her, even.  We toured the house, where I saw a sun-drenched living area and about seven bedrooms, complete with observation windows with a tiny privacy curtain the staff members could observe with. 

Surveillance.  A lot of the kids I work with are surveilled—somehow they’ve checked their ability to have autonomy at the door, and the “system” can’t afford to trust them anymore.  I guess stealing cars, running away, dealing drugs, recruiting for gangs, and the host of other things they’ve done means they can’t be trusted anymore.  But that’s how we treat them… no longer trustworthy.  Could we not look back instead and learn what has happened to them to make them this way?  There’s always a story.  Could we not find ways to mend the brokenness in their hearts, their homes, their communities?  Their teachers and counselors, many of them (hopefully most) fight against this in these unwieldy schools and centers where they get tossed, trying to recognizing the light emanating from within them, helping to nurture it.  But what happens when they leave these somewhat protective (and surveilling) places and go back to the harsh conditions they started from?  Will they be able to nourish that light on their own?  Or will they just get tossed back on that garbage heap again later in life, that heap partly comprised of the millions of people we have in our prisons?  God only knows, for life is cheap, it seems, wherever you go.