Tough Job

You know that you have a tough job when a police officer tells you so.

Today was a good day. We went on an outing to an arcade type place that is kind of like an older kids' version of Chuck E. Cheese's. I played a couple of games of laser tag with the kids and by the second one wasn't worried about what they would do. They almost seemed like normal kids. I saw some great coping skills and friendship skills and a bunch of kids with big smiles on their faces. This was not a normal day at work for me.

After we returned to school and it was time for the kids to go out to their rides, one of them started to have a hard time. This is not that unusual unfortunately. Many of the kids do not want to go home at the end of the day. This situation, however, had to do with a fishing pole. He wanted us to give him permission to bring his fishing pole to school next week. He was not satisfied with the response he received and proceeded to leave the classroom and go from a boil to a full explosion. At the point that I became involved, primarily as a spectator, he had already been contained on the floor in the hallway by five staff members. The plan in place by other people involved in his care is that when he blows out, the police are called and he is admitted to an inpatient unit. Since this is not normally our first course of action, I have never actually seen this occur. Students have been taken out by police before, but I've never witnessed it. Within seconds of the police arriving and handcuffing him, he went from raging, rambling, and banging his head on the floor to crying and asking to please just be allowed to take his ride home. His first response to the police and the handcuffs was to say despairingly, "No, not again..."

I deal with crazy things every day. The frequency of some types of events starts to make them have less impact on me. It's amazing what we can get used to when we try. Every now and then though something makes me stop. This was one of those moments.