Raising Blaze

by Debra Ginsberg

  I’m still contemplating my own mortality when I find myself rounding the Baskin Robbins again on my way home. The door opens suddenly and out comes the man, holding a scarecrow. He positions it in a flowerpot outside the store. Decoration, I think. It’s fall now, almost Halloween. He turns when he hears me pass and smiles at me. He’s got a pleasant face, not a trace of vacancy in it. I wonder again if he’s the owner. I think maybe I should follow him inside, get myself a cone, and seep up some more information. But I second-guess myself again. I don’t really want to know more than I do at this moment. And besides, I think, I’ve never really liked ice cream that much anyway. I only come to these places when I bring my son along with me.

  I wasn’t entirely unprepared for Blaze’s entry in to middle school. I knew that not only were we changing schools, but districts. Blaze’s new school district encompassed only middle schools and high schools and covered a much broader territory than his elementary school district. I knew too that a high school district has a different set of directives than an elementary school district. Conventional wisdom says that the kids here are not the chubby cherubs of grade school. They are big and gangly, flooded with hormones and confusion. Middle school and high school are the last stops before adulthood. In the best circumstances, these are not the halcyon days of childhood by anyone’s definition. I knew all that and I also knew that, for us at least, special education in middle school and high school would be a much dicier proposition than in elementary school. The feeling I got was that, by seventh grade, whatever disabilities a special-ed kid had should be clearly defined so that he could be placed accordingly. If your kid was autistic, there was a special program for him with other “severely handicapped” children. If your kid was visually impaired, he got a note-taker and computer technology to help him with class work. If your kid was SED (severely emotionally disturbed), he was put in a dead-end program for fire starters and window breakers. Next stop, juvenile hall.

  As always, Blaze fit none of the standard categories and I worried about how he would fare in a new system that seemed to have less tolerance for the gray areas between categories and diagnoses. I’d long since stopped trying to catch my flies with vinegar so, by the time Blaze was in sixth grade, I adopted a sweeter approach and called the administrative office of the new district and tried to voice my concerns about the next year as well as offer my help. I might as well have been trying to arrange a private meeting with the president. I was referred to three different administrators and left messages on several answering machines. Nobody called back.

  In the spring of Blaze’s sixth-grade year, I attended a “transition meeting” with Helen, Mr. Davidson, and the teachers and administrators from Blaze’s new school. This gathering did very little to bolster my confidence. The school itself was brand new and, after less than a year in operation, was still in the process of determining the needs of its student population.

  Mr. Davidson, Helen, and I (my parents, alas, were out of town and so this was one meeting my father did not attend) sat in a tight little knot on one end of a huge, polished conference table, while the representatives from the new school sprawled across the rest of the space. Even with Mr. Davidson there, I felt intimidated. I had never been in the company of so many large women at one time. By large, I don’t mean overweight. This was a collection of amazons: giant women with big, blond, perfectly streaked hair, sharp lacquered nails, and serious business suits in muted shades of gray. They had Palm Pilots, cell phones, and leather-bound appointment books. Each one introduced herself to us, but it was pointless trying to separate them out. I felt like I’d wandered into a female superhero convention by mistake. By contrast, Mr. Davidson, Helen, and I looked a little like their hick relatives visiting the big city for the first time.

  Mr. Davidson did most of the talking at first, describing the progress Blaze had made over the previous year and a half and delineating what he thought was most important for Blaze in the classroom (a feeling of security, a measure of success, a sense of belonging). He said he thought it would be a good idea for there to be a classroom aide. He said that Blaze was a good reader and worked best in small groups. It would be ideal, Mr. Davidson said, if Blaze could have all his classes in a small, highly structured classroom. Mr. Davidson was charming, but I didn’t notice his charm registering in that room. These were clearly very busy amazons.

  Helen spoke very little, but she did mention that I had been working in special education for the last couple of years and was doing an excellent job so that, as parents went, I was definitely in the top tier. One of the amazons gestured to me and leaned backward in her chair.

  “Are you looking for a new job?” she asked me in a stage whisper. “We could really use someone with your talent in this district.”

  “I’d be interested,” I whispered back. “But maybe we should talk about it when I’m not sitting right next to my boss.”

  After our corner had presented its case, one of the women got up and started drawing the interlocking, shaded circles otherwise known as Venn diagrams on an easel. “The kids will be spending this portion of their day in the mainstream classes,” she said, shading one portion of the interlocking circles. “This portion here will be for special day class and then this,” she leaned across the board with a nice show of athleticism, “will be for electives.”

  “Will you be Blaze’s main teacher?” I asked.

  “Oh no, I’m not teaching the special day class.”

  “Who is the teacher, then?”

  “We don’t have a teacher yet. But we’re in the process of interviewing several candidates right now.”

  “Can you tell me about how the program will be set up?”

  “Well, we think it’s better not to focus on specifics yet. We’re planning to design our program around the needs of the kids coming in.”

  It all sounded good and the diagrams were pretty, but we were talking about children here, not pork bellies, and my mind immediately translated the meaning of her words as: We have no teacher, we don’t know what we’re doing, and there really isn’t a program to speak of.

  “I’m not sure about this,” I told Mr. Davidson when the meeting was over. “They don’t seem to have much of an idea about the kids or the program.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Mr. Davidson said. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing that they’re forming a program around the kids. This way it’ll be tailored to their specific needs.”

  Although his words were reassuring, I got the feeling that Mr. Davidson was even less confident than I was. Unlike me, though, his job was done after sixth grade. No matter how carefully he tried to prepare and nurture his kids, after sixth grade they were in somebody else’s hands.

  I made a valiant effort to get a job at Blaze’s school before the start of the year. I had already decided that I would have to leave my current position in the elementary school because, by the looks of things, Blaze was going to need plenty of help in his new school and I needed to be available for him. I had been lucky enough to publish my first book by then (not the novel I’d been working on, but a memoir about my life as a waitress) and, for the first time in my life, was making a living as a writer. I figured that if I worked at his new school, I would be able to keep an eye on him and help some of the kids I’d been working with over the last year.

  No such luck.

  I went through a series of interviews at the district office and took a battery of tests reminiscent of the SATs (“Does everybody have a number two pencil? Please do not mark outside of the lines.”). After all of this, I received a call from an administrative assistant informing me that there was a position available for me in a local high school. The job description involved copying, filing, and record keeping for a couple of different teachers. There wouldn’t be much interaction with actual students. I mentioned that I’d asked for an aide position at Blaze’s middle school.

  “Oh, we’re all full up there,” the woman told me. “We don’t need any a
ides at that school.”

  I told her that I appreciated the offer, but I’d have to decline. If anything opened up at Blaze’s school, I said, I would appreciate it if she could consider me for that. She said she would and I knew she wouldn’t. Once again, it seemed, I was on the outside looking in.

  It was the end of August, a week before school started, by the time a teacher was hired for Blaze’s class. My father and I had a hastily arranged meeting with the new teacher and Clark, the school psychologist (another one, I thought—if I lined up all the school psychologists Blaze had seen over the years, I’d have enough people for a bowling team), who pointed out that he was not just a plain old psychologist, but a neuropsychologist, thank you very much.

  “You know,” my father said, “I really think that, for the right person, Blaze could provide a whole new perspective. He’s such a unique case, such a unique individual, that he could make a fascinating study. You could learn from him. I predict that he’ll be very interesting for you.”

  Clark looked unimpressed. “I think I’ve seen just about everything,” he said.

  The new teacher seemed scattered and unprepared. His room was still in a state of chaos and he had only just received the files for the kids in his class, all of which were several inches thick.

  “We’re going to do our best,” he said. “Things are a little disorganized at the moment, but we’ll all get into a good rhythm pretty soon. How does Blaze feel about starting middle school?”

  “He’s anxious,” I said.

  “Well, that’s natural,” the teacher said.

  “You know, I’m always available,” I said. “You can call me anytime and I’m willing to come in, help out, whatever you need.”

  “That’s great,” the teacher said. “I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

  “What do you think?” I asked my father as we left the meeting.

  “The shrink seems reasonable,” my father said. “I don’t know about the teacher.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  Months later, I looked back and tried to find a few grains of optimism in Blaze’s first few weeks of seventh grade. I kept thinking that there must have been something positive in his initial experience there, there must have been some happiness in the beginning. But there wasn’t. Day one was bad and from that inauspicious start, things only got worse.

  Perhaps it was ridiculously naive of me to expect the slightly fuzzy warmth of elementary school in an institution containing 900 seventh- and eighth-graders. Still, I was amazed by what seemed to be a feeling of guarded hostility among the staff at the middle school. Adults patrolled the grounds in the morning with walkie-talkies, barking at children to keep clear of the curbs, get to class, stop loitering, stop running, and report to the office. There were very few smiles. The office staff were surly. The administrators seemed as if they were waiting for the students to do something wrong, as if they were all just juvenile delinquents in training.

  It was true that the kids didn’t much look like kids anymore. They were a mass of long legs, big pants, lip gloss, and Nikes. They were all taller than I was. They were brushing their hair outside the bathroom and spitting into the parking lot. They had headsets, water bottles, and cell phones. They chattered in groups and clustered around the flagpole. They didn’t say good-bye to their mothers as they quickly hopped out of their cars.

  Standing in the middle of this twelve- and thirteen-year-old throng with my son, I could remember what it felt like to be in middle school and be one of a hundred little dramas unfolding every morning between homeroom and first period. I could even remember thinking, then, that I had no perspective, that everything seemed oversized, physically and emotionally. I looked forward to being able to look back on the experience with the viewpoint of an adult. What I saw now, from that adult viewpoint, was a group of children who were not children and not adolescents. They were in that perilous nether region that had made me so uncomfortable when I’d passed through it myself. Yet, it seemed to me that the grown-ups around them treated them all as if they had already metamorphosed into young adults and should behave accordingly. How could you demand that of them, I thought, when you could still see the shape of their children’s bodies just under their skins—when, only three months ago, they were still considered kids?

  Blaze stood outside of all this, moving in his own space and time. Would there be anyone here, I wondered, who could reach him?

  From the outset, the answer to that question seemed to be a resounding no.

  In the first week, Blaze’s teacher reported that he was “concerned” about Blaze’s anxiety over fire drills and other loud noises. I explained that Blaze had been hung up on fire drills since kindergarten and that the fire drill issue was something that had been discussed at length in every IEP meeting and was written all over Blaze’s file. Blaze tended to wander off, his teacher said, and he was “concerned” about safety issues. Me too, I told the teacher. Blaze had a pattern of testing his boundaries this way, I told the teacher. He would see how far he could go before he would be brought back. This was all in his file, I said, and I’d discussed it at the meeting, didn’t he remember? Blaze’s teacher was “concerned” that Blaze wasn’t taking notes in his science class. He can’t, I said. He can’t look at a blackboard, listen to a lecture, and copy notes. He just can’t do that. That’s part of the reason he’s in special ed to begin with. For four days out of every week, Blaze’s school was on a “block schedule,” which meant three two-hour class periods a day. Blaze couldn’t handle the two-hour blocks, his teacher said. He got up, walked around. I’m not surprised, I said. Can you handle a two-hour block? I didn’t even have classes that long when I was in college.

  “There are other programs in this district that might be better for Blaze,” the teacher said to me after one of these conversations.

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Well, there’s a regional program in one of the other middle schools.”

  “You mean the SED class?” I asked him. “The one for the emotionally disturbed kids?”

  “Well, uh, that is, um, the program.”

  “Forget it,” I told him. “Never.”

  I didn’t even bother trying to figure out why this man would recommend a program like this to me, nor did I attempt to explain why I would never place Blaze there. Although I didn’t think he was a bad guy, I had no respect for him as a teacher. After a career as a businessman, he’d suddenly decided to start teaching and this was only his second year in the classroom. He dressed with a studied casualness that came off as rather goofy and he had an awkward “good old boy” attitude that didn’t inspire much confidence. I didn’t feel that he knew what he was doing and his instincts weren’t that good, besides. I sensed that he was practicing on my kid. Maya was rather less intellectual in her assessment of him.

  “He looks and acts like a giant Easter bunny,” she said.

  That was about the size of it.

  I didn’t have too much time to dwell on his incompetence, because a mere six weeks after the school year began, just as Blaze was starting to form an attachment to him, the Easter bunny quit, throwing his class into total chaos. The Easter bunny’s replacement was Mrs. M., a middle-aged woman who had been teaching for too long and whose attitude had the unmistakable odor of resentment at having been drafted into a position she clearly didn’t want. Her antipathy toward Blaze was immediate and irrevocable. To be sure, I wasn’t an objective observer, but I had come to know many teachers throughout Blaze’s school career. I hadn’t liked all of them and I was sure that many of them hadn’t liked me much, either. Among them, they had been warm, cool, officious, loving, competent, gifted, inexperienced, hostile, and gregarious. But Mrs. M. was the first teacher I had met who simply didn’t like my child. Blaze, sensitive in the extreme, picked up on her feelings almost immediately and responded in kind. He regularly exited his classroom and refused to come back inside. He screamed, he carried on and generally acted like a mental p
atient. Usually, this got him exactly what he wanted: a get-out-of-jail-free pass from class into the office of the school psychologist.

  After she’d been teaching Blaze’s class for two weeks, Mrs. M. told me, “I’ve tried everything with him and nothing works. He won’t stay in class and I can’t follow him out. I don’t really know what to do with him. He’s uncooperative and resistant. I’ve tried everything.”

  I thought, two weeks and she’s tried everything? I started getting calls from Clark, the school psychologist who had indeed taken an interest in Blaze, although not at all the kind I wanted.

  “We’re very concerned about Blaze’s behavior,” Clark said. “His anxiety level is very high and it’s impeding his ability to function in the classroom. I think he has some serious difficulties. Have you thought about medication? I think this is clearly a case where medication would be beneficial.”

  Trying to be as polite as possible, I explained my entire philosophy on and history with the psychotropic drug issue. Clark wasn’t having any of it. He was fairly convinced that Blaze was hearing voices, seeing flashing lights, experiencing major panic attacks and, although he never said it, I knew he was thinking psychosis. I began to panic myself. I knew very well that Blaze’s many visits to therapists had only helped his ability to manipulate a situation. He was telling Clark what he thought Clark wanted to hear. If it got him out of class and out of working, all the better. What made it all so complicated, and what I tried to explain to Clark, was that Blaze really was different, really didn’t fit in, really couldn’t function in the half-assed excuse for a special-education class he was in. He wasn’t faking all of it.