All Over the Place: Parents

From My Teaching Book

By Michael H. Brownstein

F. transferred from my classroom. That’s not such a big deal. A few years ago, one of my students transferred after I called DCFS because her mother was selling her to old men. I caught her in the act. The next day DCFS knocked on her door and the entire family vanished out through the back. We were able to trace them to a town in Indiana where they vanished again.
    Another student transferred after we were able to get her the help she needed in reading. I still can’t figure that one out. The mother came to me begging for help with her daughter, who was then in the sixth grade and still couldn’t read. And when I got the help she requested, the entire family vanished from the spectrum. Still no word on them.
    I totally understood when one of my all-time best students transferred a few years back. She had cancer in the final stages and had come to the city to get help. She had a lot of relatives in the neighborhood, and this was seen as a good thing too, but the stress of living in the city was way too great on her mother. She couldn’t handle city life at all. This was making her daughter sicker faster. They went back to their small town a few states away. Last I heard, her cancer was holding steady – not getting better and not getting worse.

B. is another story altogether. She transferred to my school at the beginning of the year, stopped coming to school, transferred out of the class she was in into mine, and stopped coming to school again.
    During the second week of her non-attendance, her mother called the school office and asked to speak to her daughter. I had reported her absent. No, claimed her mother, she was there. Her daddy had dropped her off. The office called my room. No, I reported, she’s not here.
    Later the mother called back, and I was asked to talk to her. “She says she was in school today,” her mother said.
    “No,” I answered, “she wasn’t here.”
    “Do you know what she looks like?” her mother went on. Then she began to describe her daughter.
    I interrupted her. “Of course I know what she looks like. She’s one of my students.” I take pride in knowing all of my students by name by the second day of school.
    “Well, she says she was there. You must not have seen her.”
    This went on and on until I finally said, “No, she was not in school today – or at least not in my classroom.”
    The next day B. showed up with her father. The assistant principal walked them to my room.
    “Is this the class you were in yesterday?” the assistant principal asked B.
    “Yes, madam,” B. answered. B. is a very proper child.
    And then the assistant principal asked B. where she sat and then asked each individual who sat at or around her table to come out into the hall and tell her father she had not attended school that day, or any day for the previous two weeks.
    Yet B. insisted. We must not have seen her. She was in my classroom. That’s her seat right over there. Everyone is telling a tale.
    Her father took her home after telling me: “Give me a second with my daughter and then I’ll bring her into your class.”
    The next B. sighting was two weeks later when she was actually sitting in another classroom. I had marked her absent. I asked the teacher how B. came to be in her room. The teacher informed me that the office wanted her to keep B. for the day.
    The next day I was called back to the office. I was asked, “Why did you let the boys jump on her in class and do nothing about it?”
    This was news to me. She wasn’t even in my class. And if she had been and boys jumped on her, I definitely would have done something about it.
    So, the administration had to hold an investigation into the entire matter.
    An official from the board office became involved and needed to discuss the problem with me and B. and her parents. B. and her parents did not attend the official’s meeting. The investigation continued.
    And now B. has transferred.
    I hope this case is closed.

Copyright © 2021 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.