Monday, October 02, 2006

When you really know fear...

Kainen was absent from class one day last week. He's a good kid, plays on the varsity soccer team, real enthusiastic and seems to like class. He's one of the ones you miss when he's not there. For a lot of my students absences are almost as common as the days they're in class, so there are sometimes a lot of kids to miss.

I saw him in the hall at the end of the day and asked him why he missed my class. The story he told me was not one I was prepared for. He had an excellent reason for missing class. See, the police had to interview him to complete the report about the incident when another kid on the soccer team pulled a knife on him and held it to his throat.

Real slow, in case you missed that... One of his teammates threatened his life with a deadly weapon on school grounds.

Holy what-the-hell, Batman!

The police arrested the teammate and I heard that he was under house arrest, but word is that this kid is connected with a gang, maybe a new one in the school. There's plenty of reason to worry about retaliation, and Kainen was worried about it. They had an away game that night and he was worried about being on the bus with the knife-wielder's friends and I can't blame him. When a lighthearted and happy kid is worried, it shows easily.

So you can imagine what went through my mind when Kainen missed class the next day. Like I said, absences are common so there was no need to panic, but the worst definitely entered my mind. There's a different kind of fear that can start to set in when something like this happens, and it's not one I've ever felt before. Fortunately that test pilot side of me managed to keep things on an even keel while I got the right information, but this kind of fear is hard to keep at bay.

Our computer system allows us to track attendance througout the day and showed that he missed all of his classes. I spoke to my principal, but she never followed up on it. I just wanted to make sure the kid was alright.

Fortunately, a phone call to his mom after school was all it took to find out that the kid was stressed out so she let him stay home. (Why the principal didn't make that call in the middle of the day when I spoke to her about it is another issue.) In fact, it was heartwarming to find that both Kainen and his mom were grateful for the call and went out of their way to make sure I knew how much it meant to them.

But all that is really just back story, because here's what makes me really afraid. It was in the paper and someone in each of my classes knew the story so we talked about it in class. The sort of things I was hearing were "It was just a kitchen knife. What idiot brings a kitchen knife to school?!" and "I wouldn't have snitched on him. Snitches go down, that's just how it is. It's better to live with the fear than to tell the cops."

One more time: Holy what-the-hell, Batman!

Obviously, there's lots of work to be done with this community, and I'm not sure that either the school or I are well-equipped to do that work.

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