So Bryar (Chicken!) called me yesterday, in tears.
"Mom, I'm taking tomorrow off because a kid hit me repeatedly in the face and bit me twice and I had to yell at my aid and..."
And essentially had a shitty day all around, and kudos to her for saying, "I'm calling a friend of mine I TRUST with my class to come sub."
The kid who assaulted her--12 years old-- has been a problem. He assaulted an aid (not a very good one, by all accounts, who tends to escalate situations and behaviors) and Chicken before. He's a classic rules and regulations conundrum. He SHOULD be expelled, but there's a rule that says you can't expel a kid if they haven't attended so many hours of school. The rule is meant to protect kids from teachers who abuse the system--and yes, there are some--who will expel a kid they just don't like without making a good faith effort to teach the kid in the first place. The rule does NOT account for special needs kids who attend school so rarely that an instructor's attempts at basic behavior modification have no chance to work, rendering the kid a random chaos bomb. Once every two, three weeks, this kid attends school, creates weapons out of standard classroom objects, and goes around attacking teachers, staff, and other students. And then, when the bruised/bleeding teacher says, "Can we get this kid out of here please?" they are told that the kid's attendance isn't regular enough to expel.
I think they're going to overcome it this time--the principal doesn't want to let the kid back in because he's a danger to students and staff and it's a mess, and, like I said, she's taking an extra day off to make a four day weekend, and her entire staff is like, "Well done!! You do that! Well deserved!"
And I am drawn back to a week ago, when Geoffie ran around the restrooms again and came back to the car covered in people poop.
Yuck.
I wrapped her up in a towel this time and called Mate so he'd have the kids ready to wash her, but the kids were like, "People poop? Mom? The hell!"
And I was like, "Well, kids, there was a storm raging and the parks and rec people didn't get the bathrooms open and the homeless folks didn't have anywhere else to go."
And suddenly (this was ten minutes before I was on a Zoom panel by the way because my family sure can pick their moments) I was in an argument about how my dog covered in shit was all the fault of Republicans and late stage capitalism because if the capitalist pigs hadn't been allowed to run rampant the cost of housing wouldn't be completely astronomical and there wouldn't be so many homeless people and they wouldn't need to sleep at the park and use the bathrooms and be forced to crap on the bathroom concrete when it rained.
And I replied that yes, the world was a fucked up place but sometimes the best you could do--the best ANYBODY could do was defend the innocent from the people who'd been too fucked up by a hostile world to function. (This is sort of the theory behind all the zombie movies, actually... that just occurred to me as I was writing. I shall call it zombie theory from here on out.)
And that applies to the situation with the kid in school too. Yes, it's fucked up that this kid with the shitty homelife and the parents who can't get the kid to school more than once a month should now be so completely damaged by the world around him that the place where he should be safe now needs to be made safe FROM him instead of FOR him. It's fucked up. There is no doubt. This kid is twelve and at this point the best bet is Juvenile Hall because THEY at least are getting funding to deal with violent kids with severe learning disabilities as schools are not.
But nobody at the school can change any of that. All they can do is keep the kids who are NOT violent safe from this kid who keeps chasing them with scissors and beating up their teachers.
And every time I see some stupid fucking white person whining about "making schools safe" by banning books or imposing religious beliefs on a secular community or suggesting teachers should carry guns (oh my God the rampant fuckihng stupidity there) I'm going to say what I've always said.
I'd suggest they spend a day in a classroom to see what the job really entails, but they're so stupid there's no way they can NOT damage the students further.
They're the worst zombies of them all.
"Mom, I'm taking tomorrow off because a kid hit me repeatedly in the face and bit me twice and I had to yell at my aid and..."
And essentially had a shitty day all around, and kudos to her for saying, "I'm calling a friend of mine I TRUST with my class to come sub."
The kid who assaulted her--12 years old-- has been a problem. He assaulted an aid (not a very good one, by all accounts, who tends to escalate situations and behaviors) and Chicken before. He's a classic rules and regulations conundrum. He SHOULD be expelled, but there's a rule that says you can't expel a kid if they haven't attended so many hours of school. The rule is meant to protect kids from teachers who abuse the system--and yes, there are some--who will expel a kid they just don't like without making a good faith effort to teach the kid in the first place. The rule does NOT account for special needs kids who attend school so rarely that an instructor's attempts at basic behavior modification have no chance to work, rendering the kid a random chaos bomb. Once every two, three weeks, this kid attends school, creates weapons out of standard classroom objects, and goes around attacking teachers, staff, and other students. And then, when the bruised/bleeding teacher says, "Can we get this kid out of here please?" they are told that the kid's attendance isn't regular enough to expel.
I think they're going to overcome it this time--the principal doesn't want to let the kid back in because he's a danger to students and staff and it's a mess, and, like I said, she's taking an extra day off to make a four day weekend, and her entire staff is like, "Well done!! You do that! Well deserved!"
And I am drawn back to a week ago, when Geoffie ran around the restrooms again and came back to the car covered in people poop.
Yuck.
I wrapped her up in a towel this time and called Mate so he'd have the kids ready to wash her, but the kids were like, "People poop? Mom? The hell!"
And I was like, "Well, kids, there was a storm raging and the parks and rec people didn't get the bathrooms open and the homeless folks didn't have anywhere else to go."
And suddenly (this was ten minutes before I was on a Zoom panel by the way because my family sure can pick their moments) I was in an argument about how my dog covered in shit was all the fault of Republicans and late stage capitalism because if the capitalist pigs hadn't been allowed to run rampant the cost of housing wouldn't be completely astronomical and there wouldn't be so many homeless people and they wouldn't need to sleep at the park and use the bathrooms and be forced to crap on the bathroom concrete when it rained.
And I replied that yes, the world was a fucked up place but sometimes the best you could do--the best ANYBODY could do was defend the innocent from the people who'd been too fucked up by a hostile world to function. (This is sort of the theory behind all the zombie movies, actually... that just occurred to me as I was writing. I shall call it zombie theory from here on out.)
And that applies to the situation with the kid in school too. Yes, it's fucked up that this kid with the shitty homelife and the parents who can't get the kid to school more than once a month should now be so completely damaged by the world around him that the place where he should be safe now needs to be made safe FROM him instead of FOR him. It's fucked up. There is no doubt. This kid is twelve and at this point the best bet is Juvenile Hall because THEY at least are getting funding to deal with violent kids with severe learning disabilities as schools are not.
But nobody at the school can change any of that. All they can do is keep the kids who are NOT violent safe from this kid who keeps chasing them with scissors and beating up their teachers.
And every time I see some stupid fucking white person whining about "making schools safe" by banning books or imposing religious beliefs on a secular community or suggesting teachers should carry guns (oh my God the rampant fuckihng stupidity there) I'm going to say what I've always said.
I'd suggest they spend a day in a classroom to see what the job really entails, but they're so stupid there's no way they can NOT damage the students further.
They're the worst zombies of them all.
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