Quote:
Originally Posted by Boreas
By the way, the young girl had just lost her mother and is in foster care. Under the circumstances, it's not hard to imagine that she.... um.... wasn't quite herself.
I find it almost impossible to believe that her teacher and the principal were unaware of this so their actions seem to have been very callous. Whether Fields knew is perhaps less likely.
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Hey class...it's me...little miss fussybritches. My mom's dead and now I'm in foster care...so I'm just gonna fuck up the day for you and show you how the school can't tell you what to do. My ass, john.
The kids in my wife's school lived in one of the most violent and dangerous neighborhoods on the west side of Chicago. Half lived in squalor. She did a home visit one day (which she wasn't supposed to be doing) in a 4 story walk up. Some of the tenants who were more organized had run strings down to the front door with their name on a tag on the string, running all the way up to a bell by their front door 3 or 4 stories up. That was their doorbell. Assholes would rip the tags off so you mostly had to guess which string to pull. Sometimes the heat was up, sometimes it wasn't.
She goes up to the apartment to talk with the mom about her son who's having trouble keeping himself under control. But before they could discuss that, the mom wanted to show her something. She was able to scrounge up 5 steel milk crates. Each one had a piece of masking tape with each kid's name scribbled on it. They kept all their clothes and other important stuff in their own crate. She was so fucking proud that she had been able to do this for her kids. No more arguments or fighting in the morning when they all had to get off to school. Someplace to keep stuff that used to be strewn all over the house. The blonde decided to let the problem go. Thanked the mom for talking with her, and left in tears.
Everybody, every kid in that school had lost somebody. Only half of them had dads living in the home, and many of those kids dad's had been killed, or an uncle killed, or a brother killed, or some other family member in the crossfire. She used to say...most of these kids don't have a fucking chance. But every kid who came to school and sat in her class had to behave themselves. Nobody gets to be "not quite themselves."