My Story

Me and Lilya, at her orphanage graduation sometime around 2001.

My career with at-risk kids started when I moved overseas after college to work with Ukrainian orphans.  I started out visiting kids in the orphanage, and then eventually I got a house and invited some of the kids graduating from the orphanage to live with me.  I was single, in my 20s, and the sole 'parent' of a handful of teen girls with traumatic pasts and all the behaviors that go with it.  By the time I got married at 34, I had already dealt with teen rebellion, stealing, lying, pregnancy, runaways, fights, drugs, drinking....  but I also had a whole adopted family and lots of happy memories that me and the kids had built together. I learned a LOT about kids, about trauma reactions, and building relationships.

Later I got married and had my own kids, still living as a missionary in Ukraine, and my husband and I continued to work with kids from hard places.  We built a camp property where we ran programs and camps for at-risk kids and orphans.  Social services made friends with us and often dropped kids at our doorstep or asked us for advice on how to handle kids.

We dealt with kids who were institutionalized, kids who were abused and neglected in every kind of awful way you can imagine, and kids who had alcoholic parents. There were many heartbreaking scenarios we faced, and through it all we tried to do what we could to help kids who had no one in their corner.  

In 2014, Russia invaded part of Ukraine.  Our camp was in the safe part of the country, so overnight we became a refugee camp for over a year, taking in displaced moms and children.   We created an entire "pop-up refugee camp" on the fly, and we figured it out as we went. We were handling kids and adults who were going through the trauma of war and loss, and we were juggling logistics of running a facility for 100+ people on a shoestring. I could write an entire book about the craziness of that time.

Later on when my kids were school-aged, I took a teaching job at their school.  The commute was 90 minutes one way, so it made sense for me to just stay with them during the school day.  I taught English to middle and high schoolers at a Christian school for international students, primarily missionary kids.  Those kids had their own kinds of loss and struggle, and I learned ways to support kids who had stable parents but maybe needed someone else to talk to.

In 2021, my family and I moved back to the US for a variety of reasons (just in time, because 6 months later Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine and the region surrounding our camp was occupied for several months by the enemy). Once in America, I was able to find a job teaching at a school for at-risk kids.  The school is embedded in a residential treatment center, so we partner very closely with the residential facility where the students live. These kids have experienced all kinds of trauma and abuse and neglect. When I began there, the school was total chaos with an abundance of challenging behaviors. I was a classroom teacher and then later, was asked to step up as admin.  Now I am the responsible party on the ground to make sure this school runs smoothly.  It's been a learning experience of it's own kind, but all of my background with at-risk kids has served me well and I am loving this school and this role.  

One struggle I had in taking this job was trying to find successful examples of a school like ours.  The challenges were so huge that I wanted to see what had worked for others.  The internet did not yield much in the way of help.  Schools in RTCs (residential treatment centers) or juvenile detention centers are not the ones where you see teachers doing tik-toks or principals sharing their successes.  They don't have school websites or instagrams. These places are generally places where teachers are just trying to survive, and not many others understand what you deal with.

So that's the goal of this blog... to start a conversation, to share what works and what doesn't, and just to put something out there for others who might be in a similar context.  I hope it can be a place to connect and share and get ideas and help for those of us working with kids from hard places...