Just When I Was Getting Used To It

This classroom was actually destroyed by Hurricane Katrina...
but it is similar to how my classroom has looked a few times
after Montana and Anise ripped through it. 

Just yesterday I was thinking to myself that I was getting used to this job. I was starting to accept the things I cannot change... that I am now the Behavior Room teacher and not the Resource teacher. Our days had started to take on a pattern, and we were becoming a real class.

Of course nothing stays the same.

Today I found out that Anise has been sent to a residential treatment center in another state, and will be gone for at least a few weeks. And in a few weeks, Montana is transferring to the Therapeutic Day School. So by this time next month my little class will not be a class anymore.

Anise and Montana are the reason we created a behavior classroom in the first place. Before, it was just the "Support Room," where kids could come to take sensory breaks and participate in social skills groups. There wasn't even a teacher...most of the kids were supervised by classroom assistants when they came. When Montana and Anise moved into the district... within days of eachother, each having moved from another state... and had each torn up their classrooms multiple times within the first few weeks... the principal decided that we needed a full-time behavior program immediately. Literally immediately, as in, "We're hiring someone else to teach Resource so you can run the new behavior program, starting tomorrow."

If you are a special ed teacher and you're thinking, "Yeah right, this can't be true... this is a fictional tale written by someone who has no idea of how special ed works!"...Yes, I know how odd it sounds. How could a principal completely change a teacher's job, in the middle of the school year, without even asking if she wanted the new position? But it happened. And after complaining loudly to the principal, vice principal, union leader, school board, superintendent of schools, and my mother, I finally gave up and decided to just go with it.

The first few weeks were rough. The support room had been designed as a sensory paradise, with a cave made out of a table, black sheets, and lots of pillows, where kids could cool off or be alone for a while, several sensory bins, dim lighting, a trampoline, an inviting reading area, a yoga ball, a tunnel, and some toys. Now all of the toys, the sensory bins, the yoga ball, and even the books, had been put in a locked file cabinet. We'd created a daily schedule and rules and an incentive system, Within those first few weeks, the trampoline had been destroyed, most of the books torn up, the tunnel smashed, and the yoga ball deflated along with my spirit.

But I grew to like the kids in spite of myself. I forgave them for destroying all of our stuff, and I bought new stuff, some of which they destroyed again but some of which they liked enough to take care of. I tried to research ways that I could teach them, ways that I could deal with their behaviors, and projects we could do as a group.

I even had moments like the few I had yesterday, where Anise and Montana meshed with each other and with the drop-in kids, used appropriate social skills, did their school work, and even seemed happy. Moments where I thought, "I kinda love this new job!"

And now Anise is gone, and Montana is going.  Weird how things turn out.