School Stories, Part VI

When you teach high school, things get dicey.  The kids aren't really children, but not quite adults--yet sometimes they have adult problems.

When I was teaching Seniors, I had a young man I'll call John.  John was a football player and active with the show choir, which (by Monrovia standards) was unheard of.  I admired his guts.  One day toward the end of the school year, he confessed to me that his father was horribly abusive...that he'd had to go to the ER to take care of a leg wound that Daddy had caused...and the authorities were called when the details became known.  Dad was arrested, and Mom was applying pressure for the kid to drop the charges; however, because of the circumstances of these cases, the state won't allow that.  Mom took Dad back, which left John with no place to be.  He started couch surfing with friends.

I raced to the bank nearby during lunch break.  I caught the kid on the way out the door at the end of the day and gave him $50 with the admonition to stay in school until graduation.  He promised me he would try...and that's the last I heard of him until a bit later when I heard he had been arrested for breaking into snack machines and trying to sleep in the football building at school.

The next time I heard of him happened quite by accident.  I was sitting at my computer with the TV on for background noise.  Suddenly, there was a name and a familiar voice on a show about inmates at a prison in southern Indiana, and there was John.  My heart broke.

John served his time and has been "out" for some time now.  This fellow is doing his best to make good.  He has children.  He had a good road construction job but got run over by a truck.  He's lucky to be alive, but he IS alive.  He seems to be on a good track to be on the straight-and-narrow, and I pray that John succeeds in life.  He didn't have a particularly good start!

That same year, I had a student named "Lenny" who was absent some due to being incarcerated for possession of marijuana.  When he returned to class, he confessed to me that he couldn't wait to be 18 so he could move to Amsterdam where marijuana was legal.  I asked, "Do you hear what you are saying??  Are you really willing to live outside of the US just to have pot?"    Yes, he was.  Not too long later, he said he probably wouldn't be around long because he knew his last drug test would be "dirty".  Apparently, it was.  I never saw him again.