| Some Good Page 3 While on a �home pass� for a few days over Christmas break, Kayla took off. She ran away and we never heard from her again. I was to find out that this happened quite a bit. Every once in a while one of the girls would slip out one of the side doors of the facility or would not return from home pass. They were officially classified as �OTR���on the run,� in programspeak. The police and DSS and, if applicable, parents or guardians, would be notified. Sometimes the girls were found and sometimes they weren�t. After a while the state would stop paying for the bed and the girl�s name would be erased from the board in the main office. Not long after, a new girl would arrive. There�s no denying that I felt a tiny surge of joy upon hearing the news that Kayla had run, and an even bigger one when her name was wiped off the office board. I felt less tense in general and in first period in particular, and things became easier with Amanda. Without Kayla to perform for, Amanda paid a little more attention and did a little more of her schoolwork. Deep down, however, I felt sadness for Kayla. I wondered where she was, if she was safe and what her life would turn out like. Did she really believe that she could coast along on her rather average looks? Did she really subscribe completely to totally hedonistic values, as she had indicated one day in class? Was the little girl who had been hurt as a child in there somewhere and, if so, how many layers had sprung up to protect her? Would those layers ever get peeled away? I kept thinking that I would come across Kayla at some point because I was living one town over from where her stepfather lived. When she returned from weekend home passes, I would often ask her if she�d been in Somerville. �Yeah,� she�d say, with an edge to her response. �I was there all weekend. So what?� I never did see Kayla again, and I never found out what became of her. Tanisha had been the other leader amongst the girls when I started to work at Prescott. She was a thick, strong African American girl, who had been on the receiving end on a great deal of physical abuse as a young child and now was quite moody, loud and hypervigilant. Tanisha turned 18 in mid-winter and, as a result, had to move on from the program to a group home, where she could live while going to school and/or working. It wouldn�t be necessary to boot her out on the day of her birthday; there was some leeway there, but we needed to find an open bed for her soon, especially because she had become a real menace in the program. After her birthday Tanisha became even more entitled that she had been before. She stopped going to classes, which was not a bad thing as she had become too difficult to manage, but she would pop into my classroom at least once a day and interrupt whatever teaching I had been doing. Though she threatened to a few times, Tanisha didn�t run away. In those waning days of her residency at Prescott, she would say, �That�s it�I can�t take it any more�I�m leaving,� and start packing her stuff. As a legal adult the staff couldn�t stop her from going, but the they knew that Tanisha was one of those kids who had nothing and no one. We didn�t want to see her walk out without a destination, and she, clearly, didn�t want that either. Finally placement came and Tanisha packed her things for real. She would call often once she left the school, and even visited once. Word was, however, that she wasn�t doing so well. Bad habits had overcome her again. Melissa was another student of mine who had no one, not a single relative who wasn�t in jail or dead. At 14, still in possession of some baby fat, with skin like luxuriant dark chocolate, and an endearing smile, Melissa could be quite charming. Quite often, though, she would be overcome with melancholy, walking about with her head down and her feet dragging. It was hard to blame her, for Melissa had been in program after program, passed along throughout the system, trying for years to get adopted and now at an age that made it nearly impossible for anyone to even try. It�s a surprise that she was EVER in a good mood, but she was sometimes�at least outwardly�and I enjoyed hearing her laugh. For the first few months of the year, Melissa did OK in English class. She did most of her work and was passing with a B-/C+. Then about a third of the way through the school year, she stopped doing her assignments. Melissa handed back quizzes without writing a word on them and would hold her book upside down in front of her when we read aloud, refusing to take a turn reading when I called on her. When I confronted her about failing, she shrugged her shoulders and said, �Oh well.� �Melissa�don�t you want to pass and get promoted?� I asked. �I don�t care,� she said in a not unpleasant singsong rhythm. My words had no effect on reversing my wayward student�s freefalling grade, but I stumbled onto something that would eventually have the desired effect. During study periods after lunch I would let the girls use the computer in my room for various things: typing an assignment, looking up information on the Internet, or playing one of the educational games that we had. Melissa enjoyed using a software program that helped to improve typing skills. Every day that I was scheduled to have her in my afternoon study, Melissa would come to me in the morning and ask if she could use the typing game in class. Over the course of several months her typing improved significantly. In addition, I had a carrot that I used to motivate her to put forth some effort in class. She didn�t do as well as she could have, but she did stop handing in blank assignments. As for breaking through to Melissa on a personal level�well, that just didn�t happen. I always felt badly that she never came to trust me. I totally could see why, from her point of view, she wouldn�t be too eager to form bonds with people who were always passing through her life. I guess I felt that I shouldn�t be subject to the same set of guidelines that Melissa applied to the rest, but to her I was just another in an endless line of adults telling her what to do. |