Work is getting harder, but not in the way I expected.

As far as the actual workload and my flow, things are going pretty well. I am still learning (I think I will say that phrase every day until I retire), but things are running smoothly. Working at a school is so much easier when you actually know many of the students and families and staff! I recognize phone numbers and voices, and I can anticipate which teachers will need a gentle reminder to turn in their sub plans and which ones will not.

What’s getting harder is due –ironically–to the fact that I know these kids and I know these families and I know the staff.

We have a cadre of students whose families are scared to send them to school due to the immigration raids that are happening in our city. These kids aren’t just a name or a picture or a newspaper story. These kids are real kids with personalities and fun stories to share, and they are missed when they aren’t in school. I know many of their parents, have watched some of them learn an impressive amount of English in a short amount of time. I’ve talked to them about bussing issues and bullying issues and lost winter coats.

And for the most part these are kids who had great attendance before ICE showed up! These are kids who are good classroom citizens, and at a school with a lot of behavior issues, we need all the good citizens we can get.

Oh yes, the behavior issues. Staff are drowning in behavior calls. It’s bad. It’s frustrating. Sometimes it’s enraging.

And sometimes it’s just terrible. If I were to describe some of these incidents to you, you would be horrified. Even the most bleeding-hearted liberal among my friends would declare that prison school was clearly the only option for this child.

And yet…

I have seen these students during better times. I have seen that some of these students are actually quiet, sensitive. Or maybe they are exuberant and helpful on their good days. I have met many of these students’ parents, heard some of the background. I have an idea of the turbulence and chaos that may have occurred at home yesterday, last month, a year ago. A lot of these kids exist at the intersection of good intentions and generational trauma. I would scream racial epithets and destroy school supplies too if I had a parent who didn’t even care enough to get me to school more than once a week.

And then there’s the staff. I know who is going to look stricken on a bad day and who is going to do their best to hide their despair. I know who is drowning in family responsibilities and who is out of sick time, and I know who Just Can’t Anymore. It’s hard to see the kids suffering, but it’s also hard to see my colleagues suffering under the weight of societal and familial ills that we cannot fix at school.

This same stuff was all happening last year too, but it didn’t hit me quite the same as it does now, now that I know everyone. I practice piano in the afternoons and worry about a kid’s unfolding custody situation. I make dinner and I worry about my colleague who cried today after a particularly nasty incident with a student. I sit on the couch reading news reports about immigration raids and think of my favorite second grader missing library day again.

So yes, my job is getting easier in a lot of ways, but harder in so many other ways.