Going Down Into the Gully

Charlie Tryder

“Hey that's the poor man's house
Everybody get a look at the poor man's house
Everywhere they went before must have turned them out
And now they're living in a poor man's house”
Patty Griffin, “Poor Man’s House”

Two weeks into my first year as an assistant principal, I received a call in my office and instinctively glanced at the extension as I picked up the phone: 1085, Susan Soverel, our social worker. I picked up the receiver. The clip and tone of her command surprised me.

“Charlie, I need you up here now. Lenny is angry with Izzy and he just stormed out of my office.”

Mrs. Soverel, an experienced school social worker, does not panic, so I left my office and rushed upstairs. When I was hired as an assistant principal the previous year, I interviewed the people whose insights I thought might prepare me for the position. Susan provided valuable insights. I don’t remember the details of our conversation, but I left her office with the understanding that I needed to prepare for work with students who struggle emotionally in school. As a teacher in the school where I would become an administrator, I knew that we had students who needed counseling, but Susan conveyed to me that mental health impacted our school environment more than most people realize.

When I reached Susan’s office on this day, I could see Lenny, a lean 6’2” young man, striding down the hall after his girlfriend Izzy. As I passed Susan in the hall, she quickly told me that Lenny had walked away from her office upset, come back, and yelled at Izzy, at which point Izzy had bolted out of the office. Now he was pursuing her.

Lenny had been sent to my office on several occasions already, and despite the disciplinary contact, I had grown fond of him as I learned about his background. But I knew that Lenny possessed a violent temper. I tried to catch up with Lenny as he hit several lockers with his fist while walking down the hall and yelling at Izzy to stop. When I called to him, he ignored me and continued into a stairwell. I went downstairs via another set of stairs in order to try and cut them off at the downstairs exit. When I reached the first floor, however, they were already leaving the school, so I followed them outside. Lenny and Izzy headed towards a gully that runs along the perimeter of our campus. The gully was the gathering spot for students before and after the school, a place where cigarettes were smoked and stories told. I did not want to escalate the situation, so I did not run; Lenny, to my relief, was not overtaking Izzy, but his pace matched hers as they left school grounds.

I could no longer see the couple as I walked down into the gully and along the rocks in the shallow stream at the bottom of the gully, but I could hear their voices. I spotted Lenny first standing in the bottom of the gully. Izzy stood at the top of the gully on the other side looking down at Lenny.

“Please, Izzy, just stay and listen to me,” Lenny was pleading. “Just f-cking listen to me. I won’t hurt you.”

When Izzy saw me walking up behind Lenny, I think she felt safer than if she were alone with Lenny in the gully. Over the previous two weeks, I had established some semblance of a relationship with Izzy through Susan. We had bought some food for her new puppy, and Izzy and I had shared stories of our love for dogs.

“I’ll listen, but then you need to f-cking just leave me alone if I want to go.”

“I’ll let you go if you want, but just listen to me,” Lenny called to her. Izzy stared back to Lenny, and he continued, “Izzy, you know that I go f-cking insane when you call me stupid. It’s a trigger. It’s all I have ever heard.”

Lenny read at approximately a fourth grade level, and he struggled academically at our school. He was successful in a small engine repair program at a local vocational school, but he often spoke to Susan of the shame he felt from feeling stupid in school.

“And you know that you trigger me when you call me a bitch. All I can think of is my mother. You know she calls me a bitch all the time,” Izzy snapped in response. Izzy was staying with a foster family at this point in her life, but she still saw her mother, who was living in a homeless shelter in Portland.

The conversation continued, and gradually the voices lowered. Not long after being completely consumed by their emotion, both seemed fairly calm and able to converse reasonably. Lenny eventually walked to Izzy and put his arms around her. I would like to think that I somehow defused this intense situation, but all I did, at best, was make Izzy feel safe enough to come down into the gully and talk to Lenny. Lenny and Izzy defused the situation on their own using techniques and language that they had learned in Susan’s office. Their conversation could have been a script for a social work training film, though some might have found it corny and artificial.

After Lenny and Izzy completely defused, we returned to school. While walking back, ideas about how to respond to this incident raced through my mind. I felt nauseous while contemplating the already fragile relationship that Lenny and Izzy had with school and the necessary disciplinary response to their earlier actions. The nature of their encounter in the hallway, the handbook’s explicit articulation of consequences to nearly every disciplinary situation one could confront, and the reality that Lenny and Izzy would feel victimized regardless of my response worried me. Our school handbook lists the disciplinary consequences for vandalism, inappropriate language, threatening language, and leaving school grounds. The school had a history of an almost literal interpretation of the handbook, and a strict interpretation of the handbook would mean that Lenny would be suspended for a week at least.

In the first few weeks of my new job, I felt the pressure of addressing what was a very public incident firmly enough to satisfy the faculty. I weighed this against the fact that Lenny and Izzy had faced overwhelming odds just to get where they were. And I knew that they felt as though they were routinely treated unfairly and cast aside by schools. Although unsuccessful in school, Lenny and Izzy were bright, perceptive individuals. The questions multiplied with each step closer to the school. What would make Lenny and Izzy understand that what they did was unacceptable without becoming defensive? What would help change their behavior? Could this be done in a way that would make it clear to them that the school cared about them? If I showed understanding, would faculty members who viewed rigid discipline as essential in an educational setting interpret this as weakness?

When we entered the school, Susan was waiting for us. Izzy went with Susan to her office, and Lenny and I went to mine. I don’t remember what Lenny’s consequence for his actions were, but I know that it was not more than a two-day suspension. More importantly than consequences, Lenny and I talked for a long time that day: about his future, what he wanted, what he wanted to avoid. Mostly, he wanted to avoid prison, where his brother currently resided. I offered some ideas about how he might attain his goals, encouraged him to continue meeting with and listening carefully to Susan, and I asked him to consider what he needed to do to stay in school. I tried to build a connection between education and Lenny getting to where he wanted to be in life, and we discussed that his frustration and fear were understandable. What I remember with the most clarity is the moment when I asked Lenny what he wanted in life. He said that he wanted to get a good job, have a family, and be a good husband and father. I remember the sincerity and desperation in his expression and in his voice, and I remember thinking how much he and I had in common.

My experience with Lenny and Izzy highlighted for me the value of social work in schools for all students, but especially for students who live in poverty. Lenny benefited from an assistant principal who understood his plight on this day, but I hold no illusions about my ability to guide students grappling with emotional struggles that border on and sometimes cross into mental health issues. Although emotional struggles and mental health issues cross all social classes, in my experience middle class and wealthy students are far more likely to receive the help that they need outside of the school setting. Students from poverty are less likely to be helped outside the school, and they are more likely to experience the trauma and shame that creates the need for counseling.

The strains of poverty, I believe, lead to or elevate family dysfunction and the dissolution of family structures altogether. Although there are plenty of students from poverty who succeed in school and go on to find happiness, I suspect that they are fortunate enough to find an adult in their life – a parent, an uncle, an aunt, a grandparent - who models emotional balance and resiliency. In too many cases, however, the stress of poverty contributes to traumatic situations including drug addiction, alcoholism, and abuse. Adults grappling with the loss of a job, the struggle of working night shifts, or of raising children alone find it difficult to create the harmony that children need, and the children in these households share the pain and stress of the adults. Rather than learning coping strategies and resiliency in stressful times, they hear raised voices, feel emotions escalating to anger, and in the worst of situations, see violence that can stem from chaos.

In these difficult economic times, increasing numbers of our students arrive at school struggling with the residual effects of poverty. We know that students from lower socio-economic situations are less likely to read well, compute math at grade level, or score well on standardized tests. We know that students from poverty are at far greater risk to drop out of high school. We also know that students from lower socio-economic situations are less likely to have aspirations to go to college, to attend if accepted, or to stay if they attend. Nevertheless, of all the challenges I see students from poverty facing, what I fear most, yet rarely hear addressed, is the lack of resolve on the part of schools to address the issue of mental health. People can only work through so much emotional turmoil before their perceptions of the world are seriously damaged. All students need guidance, but the students who wonder whether they will eat that night, whether they will be evicted and have to move again, whether they will live in darkness after the electricity is shut off, or whether they will live in the cold because nobody will deliver oil to their home are especially vulnerable.

In order for students who have experienced trauma to thrive academically, they must have access to social workers that have professional training in guiding students through the hardships that they face. If young people are able to understand their situation and develop skills to negotiate the turmoil that they have experienced, they stand a chance to become skilled students. And to the degree that their education impacts their future, they will be better able to live satisfied, happy lives and raise satisfied, happy and loved children. The benefits are personal for them and practical for society. Unemployment, crime, prison costs, and other economic drains on society are clearly connected to peoples’ ability to succeed academically. Mental health, in turn, impacts students’ ability to navigate school, childhood and adolescence. Unhappy, traumatized young people are less likely to engage at school and more likely to drop out; those who drop out are less likely to contribute to society and more likely to depend on society for sustenance.

There are policy issues that can address the emotional struggles that students from poverty suffer. We can avoid nonsensical zero tolerance policies, we can work towards compassionate methods for addressing disciplinary situations like Ross Greene’s collaborative problem solving approach, and we can focus more on changing behaviors rather than simply consequencing them. In our district, we formed a committee that looked at our suspension practices in recent years. Although we didn’t break the data down by socio-economic class, the names on the list were familiar to me, and there is no doubt that a clear correlation between socio-economics and suspension rates exists in our district. The most important realization to come from the data that we collected was the 67% recidivism rate of those we suspended. Clearly we were not changing behaviors if the same students were repeatedly suspended. In response, we started an in-school suspension program that focuses upon students 1) privately processing the situation that led to the disciplinary situation, 2) processing the situation with a social worker and 3) staying current with academic work. We also responded to this data that revealed a large portion of our suspensions stemmed from “insubordination” (in my experience frequently a form of class struggle) by moving towards a more skill-based approach to discipline. Ross Greene, whose collaborative problem solving approach is increasingly used in schools as well as juvenile justice systems, argues that we approach lagging math and reading skills with academic interventions, but we often simply consequence lagging behavioral skills by removing students from school.

The most important response to the difficulty that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds experience, however, is to provide them with an opportunity to process their thinking, their perceptions and their actions with an individual who is trained in social work. The effect of poverty and the crisis that often accompanies it impacts the thought processes and perceptions of young people. High schools are structured to efficiently teach subject matter, but increasingly they have evolved to address matters that we previously believed parents assumed in the home. The emotional health of students is one of these matters. Without addressing the emotional needs of students, we will not make the headway that we strive to make in reading, math or any other discipline. If current economic trends continue in the United States and the population of students arriving to us from poverty grows, the role of the social worker at schools will become increasingly important.

School budgets are shrinking around the country, and I worry about the fate of the school social worker. At our school of 850 students, we have two full time social workers, a luxury in some communities, yet they are still overburdened. In recent budget meetings, we nearly lost a social worker position. In other districts facing greater reductions, social worker positions will be cut and student access to counseling will be reduced. While education grows increasingly focused upon students reaching grade level work in reading and math, there are increasing numbers of students struggling to find their way through the tension, the pain, the shame, and the feelings of worthlessness. Many, maybe even most, will find their way, but there are significant numbers of young students who will not be engaged in their education until they are able to work through the chaos in their lives. In the upcoming years, administrators must value the role of social workers in our schools, and we must communicate this value clearly to school committees and communities so that these positions are retained. Otherwise, the results will be catastrophic for individuals and society, from an ethical and a practical perspective.

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