Drugged Out
Why I gave up teaching kindergarten at a troubled urban school.
(Page 2 of 3)
Still, my decision to leave Winn came with a flood of conflicting emotions. Telling Sophia good-bye brought back fond memories of her brother and her two cousins, who had been in my class over the years. They were shining examples of what happens when the system works. Sophia’s mother, a single parent, cared enough about her daughter’s experience to send dozens of cup-cakes to class parties. Her aunt accompanied countless field trips. Sophia herself, on many dark days, cheered me with her enthusiastic giggle and her burning desire to learn. Their message was clear: School mattered. Was I betraying them by taking another job? Then again, Sophia and her family were exceptional case. Most of my students were raised in homes ravaged by crime, unemployment, and substance abuse. The instability of their private lives made it difficult for them to meet the more structured demands of a classroom setting. For me the reverse was true: The problems I faced at school affected my personal life. The amount of energy I was pouring into my teaching seemed instantly to be absorbed by the escalating needs of the children. The stress of my work took its toll on me and my family, as I succumbed to one illness after the next.
Exhausted and discouraged, I sought a transfer to my neighborhood school, south Austin’s Travis Heights Elementary, which also serves and inner-city population, though one with a more balanced blend of races and socioeconomic groups. Travis Heights has any of the problems Winn has—poverty, broken families, and drug abuse—but its active corps of parents and staff members work together much more effectively, and they have the same level of optimism that I did in my early days at Winn. That is critical. I loved teaching, and I did not want my momentary burnout to be terminal. But I was desperate to be at a school where I could have an impact. I wanted to make a difference.
HOW SIGNIFICANTLY DID DRUGS—specifically crack cocaine—affect Winn? In my last year at the school, roughly half of my sixteen students were touched directly or indirectly by drugs: Two had fathers in prison for drug use, three lived with grandmothers and one lived in a foster home because of addicted parents, at least one lived with an addicted mother, and one came in with regular reports on Uncle Monty, his mother’s drug abusing boyfriend (“My Uncle Monty got cut all the way across his stomach,” he told me one morning, “and it was bleedin’ everywhere. He was creamin’ real loud”). One child insisted during a cooking lesson that the flour used to make bread was actually cocaine. When her teacher assured her that it was flour, she replied, “Well, it sure looks like cocaine to me.” Another child, spotting a familiar face on the school grounds, blurted out to his teacher, “Ms. Carter, that lady of there sells drugs. I seen her at my mama’s friend’s house.
Two years ago, inner-city teachers were warned to brace themselves for the onslaught of crack babies approaching kindergarten age. Crack, which became readily available in poor neighborhoods in the mid-eighties, was seen to have profound effects on babies who were prenatally exposed. That summer, a New York Times article cited “an array of symptoms that include hyperactivity, sudden mood swings, extreme passivity, apparent lack of emotion, slow language acquisition or mild speech impairment.” Many students are “overwhelmed by stimuli like noise or piles of toys,” the article said, while others “are easily frustrated, find it hard to concentrate, and learn something one day only to forget it the next.” Every year, more kids with these symptoms started kindergarten at Winn.
The Times article focused on the Salvin Special Education Center in Los Angeles, where a pilot project for drug-exposed children ages three and four has been successful in preparing them for school. The classes are small, with many opportunities for personal instruction and for physical affection to build trust. Although my Winn class was twice the size of those at Salvin, I found myself patterning my teaching techniques after the center’s; I too had many students who exhibited short attention spans, extreme hyperactivity, and no tolerance for frustration.
It wasn’t easy. A typical morning began with my herding students from the coat closets over to their assigned places for such daily routines as money collection and flag salute. I often felt like Nana, the huge shaggy sheepdog who guarded the nursery in Peter Pan, as I nudged and swept my charges from their volatile exchanges about coat hoots to some semblance of order on the carpet. About halfway through the Pledge of Allegiance, we would hear Arthur whimpering outside the door as he clung to his mother. Although she and I spoke repeatedly about the importance of getting him to school on time so that he could feel as if he was part of the group, he usually arrived late. Mondays were especially hard because he made periodic weekend visits to see his father, who was in prison for selling drugs.
As I began to explain the day’s activities, Curtis would interrupt me, sputtering and grinding like an old jalopy. When I failed to react, the noises would grow louder and louder, until I finally sent him to the “time out” chair. It quickly became clear that my traditional forms of discipline would not work for him. Curtis was born to a crack-addicted mother; he went in and out of foster homes as she went in and out of rehabilitation clinics. Bright and cooperative one minute, then lashing out in rebellion the next, Curtis would kick, scram, and fling himself to the floor in a wild fury triggered by unknown frustrations and fears. The class would watch all this with alarm, of course. Only toward the end of the year did I discover that I could persuade Curtis to draw his anger and confusion on large sheets of white paper, giving me just enough time to complete my instructions to the rest of the class.
The hours would pass during art, language, and science instruction, punctuated by fragile children reaching their limits—committing some act of aggression against a classmate, vehemently refusing to share or to play safely, simply collapsing into fits. Oftentimes, I would have to conduct a small group lesson while rhythmically rocking a screaming child on my lap until his rage subsided. Then we would go to lunch and to the playground—a collective sigh of relief. Time for the children to climb and run and hang upside down, time for us teachers to counsel kids who were near the edge and to recover from a morning spent fending off catastrophe.
Sometimes, though, it kept on coming. During this period of the day, blood sugar leves dropped and tempers flared in an instant. A tearful Curtis might kick Jason halfway across the commons for laughing at him; in a single action, I would have to flip one screaming child up on my hip and hold the other’s hand as we marched of to the nurse’s office, my class trailing behind like so many baby ducks. Jason’s involvement in such blow-ups was never a surprise. Part of that year he lived at his grandmother’s house while his mother and her “friend” were being investigated for drug dealing.
ON THAT FINAL SCHOOL DAY IN June, as I worked my way down the line of students, I noticed Candace back by the door. I could feel my mixed emotions coming to a head. She was standing with her arms folded across her tiny waist and a characteristic pout on her face. “You said you were gonna give me a sticker, and you forgot!” she barked.
Candace always kept score; that day my rating was poor. I dug a sticker out of my pocket and dropped it in her backpack. As I tried to hug her, she stiffened her muscular little shoulders against my embrace. I let go and looked at her large green eyes. She turned her head away.
“Candace, I’m really going to miss you,” I said.
“You’re going to a new school,” she replied. “You’re not comin’ here no more.”
She was an insightful child with an uncanny grasp of adult situations. Nothing escaped her attention. Many mornings, as she passed me by she muttered, “You got on perfume?” or “Why are you wearin’ red lipstick?” These simple questions had the ring of an indictment. In Candace’s life, changes were seldom made with her approval, and they never made things better. She had learned to be hyper-vigilant to guard against life’s vagaries.
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