No Child is a Waste of Time

By Noelle Borst, EI Program Teacher, Oakland County Middle School

I’d like to start by saying thank you from the bottom of my heart to Lois Shulman, the editor of Connections, for giving me the opportunity to write this article. While I am, by no means a writer, I am very passionate about mental health and discipline policies/procedures in schools, and I promise to speak from my heart.

After 18 years of working with students in therapeutic classrooms (traditionally known as classrooms for students with emotional impairments) I was shocked and humbled to receive the award for Oakland Schools Middle School Teacher of the Year.

I started my career with a Bachelor of Social Work from Western Michigan University. My first job out of college was in the foster care system. I am embarrassed to say I only made it in that field for under one year. The low pay and long hours made the job difficult. However, the hardest part for me was the inability to spend time daily with the kids who needed the most support. I have the utmost respect for the people who take on the hard jobs in foster care and Child Protective Services, but I found that the high number of kids on my caseload made it nearly impossible to see kids more than two times per month. A few months into the job I was doing a “check in” with a student at his school. When I asked the teacher to speak with him the teacher said, “I don’t know why you waste your time with him – it’s a lost cause.” Nineteen years later I still remember that moment and it is the reason I went back to school to become a teacher. No child is a waste of time.

I enrolled at New York University several months after that encounter where I obtained a master’s in education and special education, focusing on mental health. It was the best move I could have made, as it allowed me to spend six hours/day with students who were in need of intense supports in the school setting. By working closely with my students and their families, we, as a team, have been able to get the right services in place to support the child. Services can range from weekly therapy, to providing reports for medication reviews and even helping inpatient facilities to write treatment plans for students who were in need of emergency hospitalization. The main thing I have learned over seventeen years in the classroom is that every child can succeed with the right support and someone willing to advocate for them.

I’d like you to read one of my favorite quotes, “Kids do well if they can.” – Dr. Ross Greene. Dr. Greene is a clinical psychologist who has been working with children and families for over 30 years. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Explosive Child, Lost at School, Lost and Found, and most recently, Raising Human Beings. He is the founder of Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) and it is this method that I have based the last 15 years of teaching on. If you visit Greene’s websites (https://drrossgreene.com or https://livesinthebalance.org) you will find that he has reduced the number of seclusion and restraints in schools and juvenile facilities all over the world. He teaches a method (Collaborative and Proactive Solutions – CPS) in which the value of the child’s view is involved with teaching the child skills. This becomes the focus of the intervention. We currently live in a world of Functional Behavior Analysis and Positive Behavior Support Plans. While this is by no means a bad thing, it also assumes that a child is able to make better choices and control their behavior as long as they receive the right reward or consequence. Greene’s approach does not focus on reward and consequences, rather a systematic approach to getting to the root of the issues. It involves the child every step of the way and interventions are done WITH them instead of TO them. If you have not read his books or visited his website and are dealing with a defiant or challenging child, I highly suggest you look him up.

This mindset has changed the way I run my classroom (and my life). As a graduate student at NYU, I studied “Level Systems” as a way to address controlling students with significant behavior issues. Level systems are an organizational framework for managing student behavior where “students access greater independence and more privileges as they demonstrate increased behavior control.” (Heward, p. 241, 2009) Students earn specific rewards, privileges, and negative consequences that are linked to specific expectations in the classroom. A point system is typically used in which a child must have a certain number of points each day to move up a level. Additionally, a low number of points moves the child down a step. The criteria for moving up and down the level system is the same for all students utilizing the system.

I used a level system for my first 5 years of teaching. While yes, it gave me control of the self-contained classroom I taught, I continuously noticed the students were never able to transfer the behavior they exhibited with me to other classrooms or to their home environment. I had students who were very successful with me, in my room, where I controlled everything.

However, when it came time for them to go to a general education classroom where things were not structured the same, they had the same behaviors that they originally displayed when referred to my room. Over time I realized that power and control (reward/punishment and Level systems) were only a temporary fix for much bigger issues. They did not teach kid skills or provide INTRINSIC motivation to learn.

After 5 years of utilizing a level system in my classroom, and after reading, “The Explosive Child”, by Dr. Ross Greene and “Teaching with Poverty in Mind”, by Eric Jensen, I eliminated the level system in my classroom and began to approach all behaviors with a collaborative approach. While eliminating a level system presented its challenges (adults no longer could control students with threats to lose a level or to offer a reward) it led to more real conversations that had the potential to change a child’s lifelong term. Afterall, what kid tells the truth to the person who is going to give them a consequence for being honest? I realized that if I was going to make a long-standing change, I needed to listen to the kid’s perspective before offering an intervention. I also had to model the problem-solving skills for them.

I have become a huge advocate for the education of the whole child. While this term is a “buzz word” especially in the wake of COVID, it truly means something to me. Our students with mental health issues need to be taught the “why” behind their behavior. They need to understand how their own life trauma affects the development of their executive functioning skills. They need to know how their medication and environmental circumstances make them feel. They need to learn to track their own moods, actions, and how other people react to them based on their actions. They NEED to be able to reflect on these things without fear of punishment (suspension/expulsion/restraint/seclusion).

I will share with you the story of one student from my long ago past. This student struggled with physical aggression (threats towards other students, property damage and aggression towards me and colleagues). I found that the more I developed a relationship with this child the harder she/he pushed back. While they would seek out my attention, they would only share minimal bits of information and then shut down or resist. I started walking him/her home each day, as they lived across the street from the school. While we had great conversations when we walked and I felt as if I was making progress, his/her behavior worsened at school. Staff members began to say I was babying them, that I had to have firmer limits, that I was crossing teacher/student boundaries. People suggested that my time with them should only be given as a reward for positive behavior throughout the day. My gut (and review of brain research) told me that using time with a child as a reward was not right. But after a year working with this particular student and no decline in behaviors, I began to question myself.

At the end of that year, I moved from the elementary building to the middle school building to re-open a therapeutic classroom at the middle school level. That particular student had two more years of elementary remaining. I did not see them for over two years.

Two years later, I was still at the middle school level when they started attending. He/she would not come and talk to me but would “lurk” around my door. If I tried to talk to them, they would walk away. Over a couple months’ time I learned from his/her school social worker that they were having significant issues with work completion/attendance/behavior/self-harm.

One day, by complete chance, I happened to be walking down the hallway and overheard a conversation with this student and another staff member. He/she was refusing to take a math test. I stepped in and said I would take the test and make sure he/she took it. Three hours later we were sitting with the local police department and their mother as he/she reported the sexual abuse that had been occurring in the home since 3rd grade (at no fault of his/her mother who was completely unaware).

The road from there was not an easy one. It was full of medication reviews, therapy, and even hospitalization. But he/she made it. I received a bouquet of flowers from his/her mother with a card stating, “You are my daughters/sons guardian angel.” I have the card to this day. I keep it in what is called my “Smile File” where I keep all my reminders of why I do what I do. I am also happy to say that he/she recently welcomed his/her own first child into the world last month.

In another instance, separate school, separate district entirely, I had a similar (yet totally different experience).

I was working with a student with extreme anxiety issues. He was so emotionally heightened on a daily basis that any interaction caused him to have a fight or flight response. He would act out physically when given a simple direction such as “Please sit down.” This child was moved into my classroom due to the high number of physical restraints that were happening with him and for the level of physical aggression he was exhibiting towards himself and others. Over time I noticed that this student pulled his hood up whenever he was anxious. We began to use it as a cue. “Hood up = give time and space without talking.” The school I worked for at that time had a strict no hood policy. I told other staff members that if this student was feeling internal dysregulation, putting his hood up was the only way he could communicate that he had to be left alone. Over time this student opened up to me. While he was a child with selective mutism, he would use an “alpha smart” (the old school version of a computer) to type what he was feeling. I noticed that if I allowed him to run out of the classroom instead of stopping him, he always went to the same locations to hide. If I allowed him to hide, he would eventually type what the issue was. We would type back and forth until it eventually led to talking and then he would return to class without the use of physical intervention. I faced a lot of pushback from staff at this school. They felt that I was not in compliance with their level system. They felt I needed more discipline and consequences for him (not knowing he was being disciplined with a belt at home each time he had a bad report).

I worked with this student (with varying levels of success) for about six months before I went on maternity leave. Before leaving I attempted to enforce that when this particular kid had his hood up, he should be left alone. When I returned from my maternity leave (the following fall) I learned that a teacher who disagreed with allowing him to wear a hood was part of a team that used physical restraint to gain compliance and he ended up biting this teacher. He bit her so hard she needed physical therapy to get full use of her wrist. My heart went out to this teacher. She was a great person who believed in the school’s discipline policies. However, those policies did not change the student behavior. This confirmed in my mind that physical intervention to gain compliance is never the answer.

Flash forward 6 months. I returned to the classroom the following fall. I learned what had happened. I continued working with this student in my room. After multiple attempts of getting parents to have psychiatric assessments and obtain mental health services with no luck I filed a well-documented claim with Child Protective Services (CPS) citing physical abuse but also mental health abuse for repeatedly not getting support for the child. At one point his father showed up at the school yelling threats to harm me. After an extensive investigation the CPS caseworker mandated mental health services. In addition to being prescribed an anti-psychotic and anxiety medication, the student began to receive weekly support with therapy. By the end of that year, he had eliminated his physical aggression, reduced the times he eloped from the room from daily to monthly and he was working with another staff member in my room to design and make jewelry for others. He wrote me a card (that I still have in my smile file) saying, “Thank you for help with my medicine. It saved me”.

At the end of that school year this student’s father called me and asked me to come meet him at their house. I met with the student, his mom and his dad and we walked to Dairy Queen where his dad bought me an ice cream, shook my hand, and thanked me for helping his son.

The point of these stories is NOT that I was right or wrong. The takeaway is that punishments, rewards, restraints/seclusion, and Level Systems are not what makes a difference in a child’s life. Trusting relationships are the most important thing. Once a child trusts you, you can work with them to identify concerns and address the problems together. You can develop collaborative agreed upon plans and enforce limits in a calm and predetermined way. You can be trusted to develop consistent communication between their school and their outside support teams (psychiatrists, therapists, social workers). It is only through trusting relationships you can openly talk to parents about sensitive topics. Relationship is the bridge to success.

I leave you with my favorite quote, “They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel.”