Rookie Teacher
As a young school teacher, working in my first (and ultimately only) school district, I had to make an early decision. Should I live in the District or live outside the District? That decision was much more important than I first realized. Teachers who live out of the District can draw distinct “lines” in their lives. They have their “work”, and they have their “personal” life. When they go out to dinner, or to the store, or to get gas, they are just “another person”.
But if you live in the District, you are “on duty”, all the time. I won’t forget that parent who perused my shopping cart at the Cardinals Market (the only place in town) and thought I was too heavy on Oreos and too light on vegetables. Or later, when Kroger’s took over the community food supply; the number of parent conferences I had in the aisle between the beans and the soup. When I wanted to buy beer, I drove out of town. (It’s only fair to say that for the first decade I was in Pataskala, it was a dry town anyway. You couldn’t buy beer or any other alcohol. Later all of that became accessible, but it still took almost twenty years before I bought beer, wine, or booze at the local Kroger).
So living in the District placed my entire “life” in the community. For a while I wrote a running column and all of the cross country and boys track articles in the local paper. And there was no hiding where I lived, whether I was being kidnapped as a young teacher, or getting toilet papered when I bought “the” house (only one so far).
By the way, I don’t think there’s a wrong or right decision to be made here. Just that new teachers ought to realize that they are making a choice – not just a career, but about life.
Knock on the Door
I taught high school and middle school, and there were few secrets in our town. This meant that when a kid got in trouble at home, got kicked out and didn’t think they were welcome, or when the family situation got so bad they had to leave – they’d often knock on my door.
There are always legal implications when you take a kid in, more now than in the “old days”. The law says you are an adult, and you have the obligation to let the child’s guardian know where they are. So when the kid came through the door, after some time to tell their story and let them decompress – the phone call home had to be made. It wasn’t a choice.
But as an adult, sometimes I could intervene to make the situation better. And sometimes intervention was – hang here. There’s a guest bedroom. There’s breakfast – and a ride to school in the morning. And there’s time – time to decompress, time to get away from whatever the issue was at home.
The easier choice would have been to turn them away. It would be the safer choice too; no charges of attempting to “kidnap” a child or worse, no threats to get you fired (the great Administrators I worked for stood for me each time – one-hundred percent. They had my back). Turning them away would put it on the kid, and his parents or guardians – not me. But the answer to that is simple: it wouldn’t be right. I made a choice, to teach in, and live in, this community. That choice determined what my role would be. And sometimes that meant taking care of a kid who had nowhere to go.
What’s Right for Pataskala
So why all of this reminiscing about life in Pataskala? Because what’s the difference between what I did in Pataskala, and what we, the United States of America, are doing on the Southern border? There are unaccompanied minors, pre-teen and teenagers; journeying a thousand miles to get there. They are running from gangs, murder, rape, and blackmail. And during the journey, who knows what “advantages” were taken. Then they are “coyoted” across the border, and sent into the hands of the US Border Patrol.
In the past couple of years, those kids were loaded on buses and sent back, some to the border towns in Mexico, and some back to the homes they were trying to escape. They came on a journey to find protection in the United States. Instead, we turned our backs on them and sent them back to the Hell they were escaping. It would be like me slamming the door in the face of the kid whose family was dissolving around them. It was wrong.
What’s Right for America
So now we are taking those kids in, taking “custody” of them at the border, and moving to secure and protect them. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t cheap. It’s especially messy at the border itself, when the sheer number of “unaccompanied minors”, kids, are overwhelming the process. But we are taking them in, not rejecting them back to the risks they took to get here, or worse.
And we aren’t just “housing” them. Many have contacts here in the US, family members, some legal and some not. We are finding ways to move those kids out of “US Custody” and into the protection of their own relatives. And for the ones with no relatives, we are working to find ways take care of them, and then move them into foster situations.
Just like here in Pataskala, there’s a right and a wrong thing to do. It would be easier if the US simply denied all the “unaccompanied minors”, and sent them away like the Trump Administration. But easier isn’t right. And taking care of these kids is more important than doing what’s easy.
It’s doing what’s right.
