stand-in parents
“Sharing the Blue Sky” was a national campaign in China launched to support left-behind children in four sectors:
1) daily care
2) education
3) safety
4) psychological and personal development
Volunteers, known as “stand-in parents,” were recruited to aid in the campaign. Many of the stand-in parents were teachers who came from the same villages as the left-behind children.
wards
My first teaching job was back in San Francisco, at a school in Hunter’s Point, on Third and Newcomb. It was a neighborhood on the other side of the city from where I’d grown up, but I wasn’t unfamiliar with it. As a teenager, right up the street from that school, once, I was at my boy’s girlfriend’s house along with several others. We were playing cards and dominoes listening to Tony! Toni! Toné! but then the girl’s mom came home. She wasn’t supposed to have guys over. We ran upstairs to her bedroom as her mom was opening the door. The girl went to stall her mom, but before she left the room, she told us, “My mom don’t play, y’all need to jump.” We peeked out the bedroom window. We were on the second floor, and below us, there was nothing but concrete. I was going to hide in the closet, but one of us squeezed through the window and dangled from the ledge. He let go and landed awkwardly, stumbling onto the ground, but he was still in one piece, so when we heard the mom coming up the staircase, the rest of us jumped too. Besides having to crawl around my house, unable to walk for the next day, I was fine.
The grandfather of the two elementary kids that I’d tutored managed an apartment building also in the Point, deep in the Point, at the end of a road, and during one summer, I’d catch the bus out there to tutor. The grandfather worried about my safety, but I didn’t have the heart yet to say bye to those two kids, a sister and a brother.
Paul Robeson and Diego Rivera Academy was the name of our school in the Point, two names for one school, which was reflective of the amount of services we crammed into that place. Founded only two years before I joined, Robeson Rivera was an intense program launched collaboratively between several agencies, created to serve youth specifically who were wards of the juvenile justice system. They were mostly violent offenders, a dream team of fuckups, each kicked out of their previous school.
To attend Robeson Rivera, students didn’t just need to be on probation, they had to be experiencing severe issues in three of four areas:
1) family
2) school
3) delinquent behavior
4) substance abuse
We’d have less than ten kids each day in the entire school. My classroom may have looked like any other classroom, thirty desks, but I’d have a class of only three kids, three spread out amongst a sea of empty chairs, a reminder that others had moved on with- out them. They’d gotten so used to being further than arm’s distance from the next kid that when I’d attempt to bring them closer to each other, to set the empty chairs aside, they’d freak out and invariably get into a scuffle with each another.
With so few students, we were given only a wing of a floor, in a building that we shared with a preschool. A nonprofit ran our school and worked to incorporate arts into the curriculum. Some dope stuff: dance, poetry, playwriting, deejaying. Down the hallway from my classroom were two mental health counselors. They’d have sessions with students individually and with their families, mostly comprised of single-parent households. The school was designed as a one-stop shop for students and their parents. Educators, counselors, a probation officer, and social worker pitching together to meet the needs of struggling youth. Sounded good in theory, which was why I was there, but isolating the students away from their peers at regular schools probably backfired. Our students saw the school as a prison. I’m not speaking metaphorically. At the entrance to the school, they had to swap their clothes for the school uniform, burgundy polos, and then they were patted down daily by their probation officer as part of a “check-in.” Their PO had an office across the hallway from my classroom. He’d pee test them occasionally as required. If they violated their probation, he could take them straight to juvie. Placement at our school was part of their probation. Hard to have school spirit about a school like that.
We were lucky to get through a week without a student cussing us out. Our response: Take a time-out. There was a Time-out Room with nothing but pillows, a fluffy solitary confinement.
We were taught “nonviolent crisis intervention.” We were given a workbook that included self-defense techniques, sketches of a teacher escaping the hold of a student: The One Hand Wrist Grab Release, The Two Hand Wrist Grab Release, The Hair Pull Release, The Front Choke Release, the Back Choke Release. And who could forget, The Bite Release: Staff should lean into the bite and use their fingers to create a vibrating motion above the upper lip of the student to get their jaw to open. The vibrating motion causes a parasympathetic response. Staff should use the minimum amount of force necessary to effect the release. Avoid pulling away from the bite. Move out of the way.
One student had stolen a teacher’s car from the school parking lot and took it on a joy ride through the Sunnydale housing projects. During gym class, two students threw rubber balls at the PE teacher’s head. It probably wasn’t the first time, but on this particular day, the teacher snapped. Put each of the students into a choke hold, putting them to sleep. I’d thought of the teacher as a gentle guy, the kind of guy you’d peg as a vegan or a Buddhist. It
