A Foster Student

My wife and I had eighteen babies, one of them twice. No, we didn’t give birth to them. We fostered them. I also came in contact with foster children through my work as an elementary schoolteacher.

One day, sitting in the Child Protective Services office, holding a foster baby, I noticed one of my newer students. His name was Shamir, and he was a nice bright helpful child. He was one of the kids who had had little in the way of education but once he got some, he caught on quickly. I didn’t know it yet, but he was a foster child and was here for a visit.

A week later, a special counselor came to school to see him. She would pull him out for a counseling session; then she would bring him to the back of the class and talk with him. The first time, things went well. The next time the counseling session must have been a lot more intense because he started crying and howling. Believe it or not, this can make it difficult for the other students to learn. I finally had to ask her to work with him in another room. Without his counselor present, he would settle down and get back to work after the sessions. One day, he was pretty upset and followed me around at recess telling me how his dad was supposed to come for a visit but never showed up.

Cody was a quiet, redheaded, second grade boy in the classroom next door. Because of some family turmoil, he was placed in a foster home but remained at the same school and in the same classroom. That’s good and bad, all at the same time.

Why? Let’s weigh the positive and negative aspects of this:

• Positive: A child has a sense of continuity, that certain things are stable

• Negative: The birth parents know where the child will be for six and a half hours a day

Cody’s parents drove a monster truck with a pirate emblem on the tailgate. After school, I had gate duty. Cody’s parents would drive by, probably hoping to snatch him. I’m thankful for the pirate symbol, because there were two nearly identical white monster trucks that arrived at dismissal time. “Uh oh! Is that the truck?” I would think as I stared at the mass exodus of students and the slow procession of parents’ cars creeping by at five miles per hour. I’d walk up to the car and get a good look at the tailgate, wanting them to notice me noticing. “Whew! No pirate logo. Thank goodness!” The principal began having Cody wait with her in the office, and the foster parents could sign him out personally.

Every teacher has an FMS (favorite misbehaving student). This is the student we fret/commiserate/deliberate about the most. Often the student has a great deal of untapped talent. In one particular third grade class, that FMS was a boy named Victor.

I knew Victor before he came to me, back when he was a second grader. He would shyly wave at me when he passed me in the hallways. He had a short haircut and a sneaky but genuine smile and bright, almost jet-black eyes.

“Who is the shy kid in your class?” I asked the kid’s teacher, Miss Tyron, one day.

I described him, and as she listened, her eyes grew wide, and she shook her head as if disgusted with me.

“Victor is not shy!” she snapped, a strange fire blazing in her eyes.

I shrugged and started to wander out of the staff room. She smiled weakly by way of apology and waved me back. “He can be my biggest challenge.” She sighed. “He gets in so many fights and has anger issues.”

The bell rang. “He says he knows you,” she added as she hurried back to her classroom.

That night at taekwondo I was doing stretches before class. My flexibility was terrible, so I had to do extra leg warmups. I heard a familiar voice, “Hello, Mr. Zollner.”

Running into kids from school can be a little unsettling. First, the kids are surprised to see me since they think, on some level, that I live in the classroom. Second, I’m ADHD, and I forget where I park my car, so I can’t remember the names of every child at the school. (Even the kids in other classes expect you to remember their names). Third, I often see children years later, when they are in their teens or in college, and even if I remembered them way back when, I can’t usually recognize them.

I turned and saw Victor, his grin mischievous and his eyes twitching just a little.

“Ummm… Hello,” I said. Such a witty conversationalist.

“I see you at school. You’re a teacher.”

“Actually, that’s my twin brother.”

His smile turned into a frown. “Just kidding,” I said.

The next day, his grandmother approached me before school started. She spoke broken English, and I spoke broken Spanish. We managed to communicate.

Victor had been in a number of foster homes and allegedly faced abuse from step-dads and foster parents.

This became a regular thing. She would ask questions and I would venture forth with my best-guess answers about Victor, his anger issues and also about reading, writing, math, etc. She told me that Victor gave her a hard time. “He screams at me and curses at me!” she said in exasperation.

One school year ended and a new one began. Victor’s grandmother still had custody, and she requested having me as Victor’s teacher. She said he had never had a “man teacher.”

“Oh, you have Victor in your class this year?” I must have heard that ten to fifteen times from other teachers. I’m afraid they wore a wicked, better-thee-than-me, smile as they said it.

Teachers make more decisions per day than any other profession except air traffic controller. Having a student like Victor in your class is a delicate process. You waver back and forth between intense, heartfelt encouragement and serious/I mean it pseudo-psycho teacher stares.

I sat him up front, right next to my desk. Good place. Safe place. Too close for comfort, and too far away from the center of the action.

Victor could function in highly structured environments but could not “survive” something different without lashing out. Group work is helpful with all third graders, but a student like Victor needs it much more than most, so we did a lot of group work. The first two months were the best. I reserved a cleanup/rearrange activity for the end of school—Victor’s reward if he had a good day. All was well until I realized he would not be able to handle recess and schedule changes.

We had to make a lot of allowances for Victor. He would go for weeks without recess, because he would get in fights. (“Victor kicked me in the privates)!” I could sense days when his “temper-temperature” was rising. He now had two seats: one with the other kids and the other near the chalkboard for the challenge days. I resisted giving a child a seat away from everyone else, but there were days when Victor was violent, and I had little choice. Victor had a right to an education, but so did every other child in the class.

And yet…

Victor was brilliant. I don’t use that word lightly. He began to love reading and math and became adept at deciphering the higher-level, rigor questions we teachers often like to ask. His infectious grin would “smile up” his face when he unlocked a tough question.

He could be helpful but didn’t know when to quit helping. He was cheerful one moment and sullen the next, but every morning he greeted me with a broad smile.

He cheered me up.

At the end of the year his Grandma came by after class and thanked me, but I thanked her too. I told Victor, “I really enjoyed having you in my class this year.” It wasn’t mere public relations. I will miss him.

Sometimes, you just want a child’s life to slow down to the point where they can learn the social skills they need to control their anger and impulses. Sometimes, we have to wonder, watch, and wait.