I will never forget the day that I went to get cookies for snack time from one of my student’s backpacks and it meowed at me!
When Jr. came into class, he told me he had brought cookies from home for our snack. I told him I would get them out later and to go ahead and hang up his backpack and sit down for breakfast.
Later, that day, after I had taken my students to Music, I went back to the room to get snack ready. I reached into Jr’s backpack to get the cookies and heard a meowing sound! In the bottom of Jr’s bag was a kitten!! The poor thing wasn’t very old. I don’t know why no one had heard it during the morning.
I took the poor little thing out of Jr’s backpack and headed down to Music. I pulled Jr aside and showed him the kitten. He said, “That’s my kitten!” I asked him why he put the kitten in his backpack. He told me, “So my sister wouldn’t get it!” Oh, boy!
As luck would have it, Jr’s mom was at school for an awards assembly. I took the kitten to her so it could go home to its mama!
Teaching full-day kindergarten, I had a high school assistant principal’s son. My young friend was really struggling. Mom was super-amazing and moving heaven and Earth to find out why her son was having such a hard time. When “William” got frustrated, he would overturn desks and chairs, scream, trash the classroom, and dive under a table.
Later in the school year, we learned that "William" had a diagnosis of functional vision disorder. This meant that when he saw something on the board and had to transfer it to paper on his desk. In “William,” it manifested itself in this way: Symptoms can range from mild blurriness to complete blindness and may affect one or both eyes. Common presentations include tunnel vision, double vision, or visual distortions, and the severity can fluctuate over time. Mom was given some tools to help “William” be successful in school. However, by this time the school year was half over. Mom asked me to tutor him over the summer to catch him up.
The following year, whenever “William” would become frustrated, my classroom was his Safe Room. I tutored him again the following summer.
When our school building was sold, I was transferred to another elementary building within the district. Because “William’s” mom was a district employee, she was able to transfer “William” to the same school I was transferred to. I was his Safe Room there, too. Many times. “William” would see me come into the building in the morning and asked to come to my room with me. He’d play with some of my materials or we’d go over his homework. He called me his “School Mom.” He would say, “I have a mom and Mrs. Jenkins is my School Mom.”
When “William” graduated from high school, I went to his graduation party (We had since moved from that area to another part of Kansas). When I pulled up, he came and gave me a big hug and said, “I can’t believe you came!” As I visited with people I had known from the district, he was circulating through the people who had come to wish him well. He kept coming back to me, hugging me, and saying, “I can’t believe you’re here!”
It’s about relationships!
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