Teachers, You're State-Mandated Snitches

The Things Kids Bring to School and What We Do With Them

The Things Kids Bring to School

We once had a child at A_________ Elementary bring his family’s rent money to school.

He spent recess passing out $100 bills to his classmates as if he was Drake at a strip club. Apparently, he knew where his parents stashed the rent for safekeeping and decided to pilfer the wad of bills for himself. A yard lady noticed kids skipping around the playground waving Benjamins in the air like bon voyage kerchiefs. She confiscated the bills and followed the money to its source. The school’s administration never successfully recovered all of the rent the kid had so freely passed out. We also didn’t punish the child because we had a hunch he’d be more than adequately disciplined once he got home.

Another time at another school, I was speaking to a fourth grader as we were preparing to go to a district-sponsored overnight camp. He suddenly revealed to me, “I like going to camp. Every summer I go to a camp for kids whose mothers have H.I.V.”

I was glad that the camp had succeeded in eliminating any sense of stigma attached to H.I.V, but then maybe they should have held a workshop on discretion so children don’t go around advertising their parents’ medical conditions to random teachers.

Children often arrive to school bearing tribute for their teachers composed of personal possessions, money, and loads of chimse (gossip) about their families.

They have no qualms about divulging their parents’ divorces, their household’s sleeping arrangements, the premises of family arguments and even the details of how their dad cuts his toenails with his teeth. Teacher become collectors—of stories and clutter and whatever the latest, coolest toys are (Pokémon cards one year, Fidget Spinners the next). Students just keep bringing us stuff - from personal information to personal property.

I’m not a parent, so it’s always been perplexing to me as to how to react to the obscure and inappropriate items children bring to school.

Is the information they provide innocuously funny? What is my response supposed to be exactly when they start divulging intimate stories of their domestic life? Do I believe what they reveal? Or is what they say suspect, prone to hyperbole and misinterpretation?

Childless Teachers Are Not Less Than Parents

I try to cultivate compassion and empathy for families because I know, by proxy, that raising children is tough. And actually, as a childless gay man, many times I have felt I’ve had more sympathy for parents than my heterosexual colleagues who have children.

Teachers who are breeders don’t take any excuses for bad parenting, probably because they know better. I have attended meetings with my colleagues where any hint of negligence or laziness on the part of a student’s guardian was met with an immediate stern, collective scolding from all the other breeders in the room. In such scenarios I usually stood by silently, as a childless teacher, watching the verbal lashings with surprise and cringe.

A significant dynamic for me early in my career was that I was either the same age as the parents or younger. Many of the mothers and fathers were my contemporaries. I soon realized that being parents didn’t make them necessarily any wiser or more stable or more careful in their choices than me in my twenties and thirties. Many parents are just as irresponsible as anyone else at that age. Reproducing offspring doesn’t make anyone automatically wise.

Before this realization, there were times where I deferred to these parents as knowing better than me just because they had produced children. This was a mistake. I acceded an automatic deference to them that wasn’t necessarily earned, as if their heterosexuality and brood of children was somehow a mark of superiority over my own life’s experience and sense of judgement.

As social workers, cops, judges, nurses, and teachers, we often encounter people at their very worst. We witness some truly terrible life choices being made in real time.

But if I try, really try hard, to contextualize and offer parents the benefit of the doubt, it helps me not think of myself as neither superior nor inferior to parents. While I’m not less than them to be afraid of correcting what I see as neglectful maltreatments of their children, I am also not so superior to them to pass punishing judgements on their life choices.

It’s very difficult balance to strike as an educator but one that will help extend the life of the enthusiasm for the job. Otherwise, ruminating over the ill decisions of others can nudge a teacher into a brooding misanthropy, a cynical rationalization that questions, if the parents aren’t doing the best that they can, why should I?

But Teachers Are Still State-Mandated Snitches

My preschooler Neil was complaining that his ear hurt at breakfast time.

At that point of the morning, my preschool class was bustling, crowded with arriving children, their parents, siblings, and school aides. Neil’s mom, in fact, was right there in my classroom helping the other moms serve breakfast. As the little boy complained to me about his ear, I was a little annoyed thinking, why are you telling me that your ear hurts if your mama is standing right there? Go tell her.

Neil kept complaining to me, so I finally took a look at his ear. I was assuming he was suffering an earache so I looked into the ear canal but then he bent the top flap of his ear downward to reveal a gnarly, bloody gash. Mind you, his mom is still standing right there as he is showing me his injured ear.

“Oh my God, Neil! What happened?” I asked him.

“My mom hit me,” he replied in English.

Awkward.

The mom immediately started explaining how the day before Neil had been playing dangerously near the street curb and almost got hit by a car. She pulled him to safety by the ear and in the process, with her manicured nails, she had injured him.

I told her that I understood. And I sent them both to the nurse so he could get treated. However, the little dude had just used trigger words—my mom hit me. As soon as he said that, I knew I had to file a child abuse report. This was our teacher training, or indoctrination, by the District. However, usually in these scenarios, when a child admits to their parents hitting them, the parent is not standing directly in front of you looking at your reaction.

Later that day, I filed a child abuse report to the appropriate authorities.

Of course, the next day, the mother arrived early to school, upset at me. She was angry and scared and, honestly, really hurt. There was no hiding who had filed the report. The family was undocumented and when the social workers arrived at their house to investigate, she told me the children were terrified because they thought the authorities were ICE. She was near tears as she told me that she would never purposefully hurt her child and that I knew myself how rambunctious Neil could be.

And I did. Everything she said was true. I believed all of it. It was doubtless in my mind.

But I was also an employee of the District that had trained me in no uncertain terms that if a child is hurt and reveals that someone hurt him, you need to file a child abuse report or your job will be in jeopardy. The determination of what is and what is not deemed child abuse is delegated to outside authorities, not the teacher. Your job is to report, not investigate or determine what is right or wrong. And it’s a pretty shitty position to be in. Regardless of doing the occupationally appropriate thing, I still felt like a snitch. Like a state informant.

Being a parent is difficult. Being a poor undocumented parent with a child who runs willy-nilly into the street is tough, especially if you’re matched up against an agent of the state made hyper conscientious by an exacting employer.

On the other hand, maybe Neil’s family needed that social services wake-up call, if I’m to be generous to my role in reporting them. Was there an acculturation of their child-rearing tactics in order? The cases of abuse not reported or followed up upon can often result in further abuse, if not death.

The horrid torture and demise of eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez, subject of the intense Netflix documentary The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, attest to the systematic failure of authorities whose main job is to follow up on such reports of abuse.

Nevertheless, that decision to report Neil’s mother has always pained me.

I still don’t know if it was the right decision, but I think that is why the District makes an educator’s reporting responsibilities so unequivocal. Even the slightest suspicion of ill-treatment or neglect mandates action. The policy is designed to take away an employee’s quibbling discernment, their political sympathies, their personal morality and judgment and hand it off to social workers and law enforcement. But I don’t know if it is good practice to hand over your moral judgement to your employer.

Teaching is always finds you is some kind of dilemma and it takes years to hone a nuanced understanding of your imposing role in the lives of the families you encounter. And even when you do develop a more complicated, empathetic response, problematic situations continue to arise.

And you’re still always a state-mandated snitch.