Drugged Out
Why I gave up teaching kindergarten at a troubled urban school.
(Page 3 of 3)
Several years ago Candace’s young mother—a crack addict—abandoned her and her four siblings. They moved in with their grandmother, who is hard-working and kind, but caring for these emotionally wounded children strains her nerves and her budget. It was obvious in class that Candace was hungry for maternal attention. All year she touched my clothes, my hair, my earrings, and the things on my desk (an “off-limits” area for students) as if they were magical. She quizzed me about what I like to eat and where I go after school. She engaged me in her ambitious projects to make books about princesses and castle in order to capture my undivided attention. When she felt invisible in our class of demanding five- and six-year-olds, she picked a fight or snatched a toy or marched off to the bathroom without permission. She snuck into the closet and swiped box drinks and cookies from lunch boxes that were packed for other little girls. When confronted, she would swear convincingly that she was innocent; then we would follow a trail of sugar ants to her cubby box, where she had stashed the stolen goods She was struggling for control of her world and for control of me. All year she had, by turns, held me and then pushed me away because she knew how dangerous it is to make someone your own and then lose them.
Last winter Candace heard me talking with a classmate, a foster child, who was going back to live with his father. He was torn with confusion, and I was investing great energy into reassuring and supporting him.
“I’m gonna live with my mamma now,” Candace mentioned as the final bell was ringing that day. “She’s gonna come get me, and I’m gonna live at her house. Jus me and my mamma.”
When she repeated the same story the next day, I asked a staff emember, who has known her family for years, if it was true. She shook her head. “No, that woman is burned up on crack,” the staffer told me. “She came by my house on Halloween night, beggin’ for money, and I said, ‘Patricia, look at you! I’m not givin’ you any money to buy drugs!’ Mrs. Wright, she was the skinniest thing you ever saw, and her eyes were all red. She looked awful. You can’t get off that stuff. I had a cousin who went into rehab, and he was back on crack in two months. No, honey, Candace isn’t gonna live with her mamma.”
What can I say to Candace that will help? From her six-year-old perspective, she probably thinks that she is the reason her mother left—that if she were a better kid, her mom would still be with her.
At my classroom door, as Candace and I said good-bye, I was paralyzed by my reluctance to let her go. She was angry at me for abandoning her as her mother had. The truth is that I am not Candace’s mother, and after that day, I would not be her teacher. I had to let her go. I could not fix her life. I did what I could.
LATER THAT DAY, I LINGERED IN the empty halls, chewing over the ambivalence I felt about leaving—the sense that I was deserting my duty to Candace and so many others like her. A young pre-kindergarten teacher stopped to commiserate. She had just watched the school buses pull away, loaded with shouting children.
“I could hardly let go of little Henry,” the teacher said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to him this summer. It just scares me to death.” Her eyes filled with tears.
We headed toward the teacher’s lounge, where the conversation centered on Milton, a rambunctious second grader of some renown. His teacher had worried for some time about sending him home to an alcoholic father, having grown up in such a situation herself. As she leaned over to hug him good-bye, he said, “Just you wait, Ms. Gonzalez. You gonna see me in the newspaper one day!”
“Why Milton?” she asked, amazed at the apparent turnaround. “Why will you be in the newspaper?”
“I’m gonna murder somebody,” he proclaimed with chilling nonchalance.
Milton’s world was bereft of the love and tenderness an eight-year-old child deserves and needs. As he absorbed his father’s fury and failure, he had to be tough and mean, suspecting his father would not protect him. What e want5ed to say to his teacher, who had shown him care and patience, was, “I love your, Ms. Gonzalez. Please notice me.”
The storybook picture of school holidays as times of family togetherness and carefree play is strained in a community where drugs, poverty, violence, and despair have crept into neighborhoods like leeches, sapping their vitality. A colleague recalled tiny William, who used to cling to her leg whimpering whenever a holiday approached. “I had to peel William off of me in order to get him on the bus,” she said. “It tore me up to send him home. His mother was an addict, and he older brothers tortured him. It was all I could do not to take him home with me.”
When this same teacher found herself teaching an older grade, William showed up in her class again, this time equipped with new survival skills. He was tough, aggressive, untouchable. Inside was the same frightened little boy, but on the outside was the requisite suit of armor. He had learned like his brothers before him, that any accidental brush in the hallway from a passerby was occasion for clenched fists and a hostile “Don’t mess with me!” He had learned that the world is a vicious place, that masks and shields are necessary protectors.
William and Milton had to become independent and resourceful because no older family members really cared about them. They have built impenetrable walls around themselves to keep out disappointment and hurt. As they have hidden behind these walls, however, they have also shut out love, caring, and gentleness. For children this age, it is a terrible loss.
WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES THE job so unbearable that nearly two thirds of the faculty (by my count) wanted to leave? Why is it that, after seven years, I too sought a new position? Being a teacher at Winn was often more like being a social worker than an educator, and I, like most of my colleagues, was not qualified to do social work. Where before my work simply left me tired, now it left me drained. Where in the early days my successes inspired me to continue, now there were lost among a continual rush of new crises. My fellow teachers offered support during this difficult period, as they always did, but I began to feel as if I were paddling a sinking dinghy.
The ultimate frustration for me—beyond the spiraling numbers of desperate families, beyond the constant exposure to the effects of drug addiction, beyond the difficulty of simply doing the job—was the absence of a larger framework to address the critical problems that schools face today. From the principal to the custodians, we were all moved by what we saw, but we were trapped by our despair. For these children who needed us so much, whose lives were truly out of control, we had given and given and given, and still we wondered whether we ever gave enough to make a difference.
As I settle into my new third-grade job at Travis Heights, I’m filled with hope and good feelings. A whirlwind of pilot projects and innovative programs provides the resources for many of the services required by our kids and their families. I can send my students to our full-time nurse. I can send them to our counselor, to one of our tutors on loan from St. Edward’s University. I can send them to our social worker. Winn seems incredibly far away.
But it continues to be on my mind. In dreams, I see the faces of the ones I loved, of Jason and Arthur and Curtis, of Sophia and her brother and her cousins, of Candace. The sadness I felt every day, as I held them and worried for them and tried to make their lives better, has not waned. Moving on may have been the right decision, but it hasn’t been easy. I cannot forget them.
* NAMES IN THIS STORY HAVE BEEN CHANGED.
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