dominique*

i started student teaching at cleveland high school this week, which is just 5 minutes away from my house. about 17% of  the students there receive special ed services, 2/3 get free or reduced lunch, and 2/3 do not live with two parents. you wouldn’t know a significant portion of the student body come from low-income families by looking at the school though — it is really nice. it’s true that a fancy building can never cover up the struggles of the community it serves, but i’ve found that the aesthetic beauty of space matters in raising student (and teacher) morale. struggling students don’t wanna go to school in the first place; they certainly don’t wanna go if the building smells like piss all the time.

today, i recalled a story my faculty advisor told me once about a previous student of his. she was very smart and talented, but struggled when she started her job. the challenge of her work did not come from lack of preparation, but from her internalizing the stories of her students. for many reasons, a disproportionate number of kids who qualify for special ed services are poor, and for many reasons, poor families have a lot of awful stories. the heartache of her students would stay with her, and soon, she was too overwhelmed to continue on. 

i hope that doesn’t become a problem for me too, but i definitely felt shaken a bit today when i heard the story of dominique*, a student who comes in for two periods a day. a few years ago, she was involved in a car accident that killed both of her parents and left her paralyzed from the chest down. when she returned to school, she soon found that she was no longer able to keep up in her regular gen. ed classes, and qualified for special education services with tbi — traumatic brain injury. her ability to read and comprehend text disappeared.