Yesterday was a bit of a stressful day. One child came in with a note explaining that his/her absence for the last two days was because of visits to Child Protection. I was shocked — could not imagine there being a problem in this child’s family. I was still trying to connect with our social worker, because she found out that another child had witnessed violence at home, including mom covered in blood, and because I wanted her to talk with a third child, who told our volunteer a garbled story about hitting and mom maybe getting hit by her boyfriend.
I was already feeling tense because at our mentor meeting before, we looked at test data that showed most of the classes in 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th did worse on their winter testing than they did in the fall — the percentage of children way below standard was actually growing! And the response of some of my colleagues was to make excuses. Which kind of made me sick.
Anyway, I finally did connect with the social worker, in a busy hallway for two minutes, where we spoke in code about each child and learned that the first one’s family is fine — mom brought her child to CP because of someone/something that happened outside the home. The second one’s story about mom covered with blood is true, but it happened a long time ago, not recently. This child is in counseling, so not sure what else to do. The third one, the social worker will look into. The thing is, the third child is super happy and relaxed all the time, so I’m not sure it’s a continuing trauma.
Elbows, knees, dreams 