This commentary is by Samn Stockwell, a poet and educator from Barre.
I have been following the discussions about an attack that happened outside of the Barre City school and the calls for discipline.
When I was a special educator, I knew many children with behavior issues. It was a challenge to keep the child and the children around them safe.
A young student I knew was unpredictably explosive with adults. Once his teacher reached out to touch his shoulder and he turned around and bit her. He was about 8 and this broke all the rules of classroom behavior. Clearly, he needed more discipline.
Yet, his records stated he had been in 17 foster-care placements and been sexually and physically abused by his mother and stepfathers. From his point of view, he had been disciplined all his young life.
Another young child I worked with had been found in a back room tied to his crib during a drug raid.
One of the hardest children to work with had not been fed on weekends during his infancy. During the week, he was at child care, where he was fed and gained weight. Every weekend, he lost the weight he had gained. On Mondays, his whole body would stiffen when he got fed. I saw him again when he was several years older. He argued with every rule and looked with suspicion at the excellent teachers in Barre City.
According to Child Trauma Academy, one in seven children has experienced trauma. In my experience, most young children who have been beaten, neglected or sexually abused grow up with disruptive and destructive behavior that makes it very difficult for any classroom teacher to successfully teach them and keep them engaged.
No school can fix the profound nature of injury some children have experienced, nor can a school remedy the conditions that make the lives of parents of many young children difficult: homelessness, poverty, and the hopelessness of dead-end jobs that will never cover the cost of rent.
Outcomes could be improved if every community fully funded the needs of its school.
When I was helping young children with special needs transition to school, I had very different experiences. One child with autism spectrum disorder was transitioning to a school outside Barre City and the other child with autism spectrum disorder to Barre City. Communication delays are a basic feature of autism and early childhood is a critical period for language development. Not getting needed speech services means greater delays in language skills and social skills. It means greater frustration in getting your ideas across and a greater likelihood of not being able to succeed at work after graduation.
The other school offered four days a week of instruction, with special educators and speech therapists available. Barre City offered one day a week, no speech therapy available, and they offered that one day a week because that’s what they could afford.
The educators were committed and hard-working, but they couldn’t create the funding to make sure children get what they need. The community has to do that.
Outcomes could be improved if there were enough excellent mental health programs easily available, and that means funding those programs.
Outcomes could be improved if families had secure, affordable housing, which again means we would have to decide to spend money to achieve that goal.
Outcomes could be improved if we had excellent and affordable child care so that working parents would not have to leave their children in substandard care.
How we invest in the well-being of all children will affect the economic, political and cultural environment of our future. Will they be successful in building careers and strong relationships? Will they be engaged in the issues in their community, finding time to make their voice heard? It depends on what we do as a community to support the needs of families.
Here is a quote from a pioneer in the importance of stable relationships for young children:
“Just as children are absolutely dependent on their parents for sustenance, so … are parents, especially mothers, dependent on a greater society for economic provision. If a community values its children, it must cherish their parents.” — John Bowlby, Maternal Care & Mental Health WHO report, 1951.
