The Challenges of Facility Teaching

 Where do I even start?  As if teachers aren't facing enough challenges, teaching in a facility (like a juvenile detention center or a residential treatment center) brings a whole new banquet of challenges. Here are just a few...

Turnover.  Kids are in and out so often that, at least at my school, we're going to end the year with maybe only one or two kids we started the year with.  This makes it extra hard to build skills with kids, cement relationships, and even establish procedures in your classroom.  The way our school is set up, as soon as we get a student stable and seeing some success, they are transferred out to another school.

Academics.  The students are behind, they often have diagnosed or undiagnosed learning disabilities, and a huge lack of motivation to care about schoolwork.  On top of this, most of these schools are given laptops and some sort of terrible online curriculum and that is supposed to be enough to get kids caught up.  Because these facilities are small, teachers have kids in several grade levels in the same room. You might have a 6th-grade World Cultures student and a 7th-grade State History student and an 8th-grade US History student all in the same small class.  So attempting to teach creative, engaging lessons on each separate grade level is a huge challenge. 

Restrictions.  If you are a teacher, remove from your desk/classroom anything sharp, anything heavy that could be thrown, and anything that a kid could potentially use to harm themselves or someone else, and you start to have an idea of what facility teachers have to handle.  In our school that means we have to watch staples, batteries, scissors, and we don't even use things like spiral-bound notebooks. I had some Christmas lights strung up in my room and I had a middle school kid BITE the bulbs, leaving sharp glass stubs. On top of that, these students are often not allowed to use the internet for anything other than the limited apps/sites we use for curriculum.  Try doing a research paper when you can't use the internet and there are no textbooks and no library!  And we are not even a locked down facility, other facility schools have even tighter restrictions.

Heightened emotions. These kids have been removed from their home, usually because of traumatic events. These kids have been through parental neglect, horrific abuse, loss of a parent to jail or death or abandonment, rejection, separation from parents and siblings, and much more.  They often have had major behaviors before they even get to you, leading to lots of consequences.  Often this means even more turmoil as suspensions, punishments, and even legal issues swirling around in that child's life.  So kids walk into your door with all kinds of baggage and a heightened emotional response just ready to be set off by any minor thing.

Interruptions.  Often one benefit to an on-campus school for a facility is that they have access to the students all day -- this helps them meet therapy requirements and make sure kids are getting to all necessary appointments (court, psych evals, doctor/dentist/eye appointments, family visits, etc).   Having your students constantly pulled out of class makes it hard to keep the rhythm of class on track.  In addition, we also have students on safety plans, so they are required to be in arms'-length of a staff person which can be tricky.  We also regularly have students out of school for weeks at a time due to a trip to the psych hospital for a suicide attempt, or running away.   Meltdowns or restraints that happen at school also are a big interruption and distraction for the remaining students. 

Behaviors!! Yes, there are TONS of behavior issues in typical public schools today.  But take all of your "worst" behaviors and put them in one room, and that's kind of what we have in a facility school.  All of the most challenging behaviors are all together, and feeding off of each other.  Behaviors I have seen in this school:  twerking on the table, running away (spontaneous, but also coordinated where some kids run out the front door and others run out the back), punching the wall, demonstrating stripper moves to the class, throwing anything not bolted down, flipping desks, screaming, swallowing batteries (AA!!), crawling under tables, and many more that I probably blocked out. In addition we've had kids crying uncontrollably, sleeping for hours as a coping mechanism, kids curled up in a fetal position, kids who shut down and seem completely unresponsive, and kids attempt self-harm.   All of this makes learning prepositions or slope-intercept equations seem pretty irrelevant and impossible to focus on.

For those of you who have never been in such an environment, here are some of the more suitable-for-work quotes from some of my students just to give you a feel for these kids:

"Dayum, if they didn't have that law, I wouldn't even be a felon!"

"I feel like getting restrained today..." (and proceeds to work herself up until she gets into a restraint)

"Damn girl! Who pissed in your cheerios?"

"Miss, it's the day before spring break, I ain't tryna LEARN nothin!"

"I like mental hospitals honestly... I only got booty juice once!"

Yep, these are our kids. And we wouldn't be in this if we didn't love these kids.  But all of these things are extra challenges that are so hard to know how to handle. Some days it feels like you're just trying to survive and make sure no one gets broken bones, let alone trying to teach 4 different levels of science to 5 kids in the same room.  I don't think there is any solution that will fix it all.  But it's sure nice to know that someone else is going through it, you're not alone, and maybe there are things that will help, or ways to make the job a little easier. 

What unique challenges did I miss?