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 with kids, and even establish procedures in your classroom.  

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.  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! 

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.

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 less inappropriate 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 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 things a little easier.