Thursday, June 23, 2011

A Sad Reality

You do this long enough, and you are going to lose students. In the time that I have been teaching and counseling, I have had students die by drunk drivers hitting them while they were going home and driving carefully, and while one was riding his bike after work on a lonely stretch of road with a friend. One seemingly blazingly happy girl who played basketball for me took a gun and killed herself shortly after quitting her job. 4 wheeler accident, drowning, and being hit after running a stop sign onto an odd stretch of road. Another was on the back of a motorcycle and her boyfriend hit a rock while going 100. After every single one, I have felt gut punched and sorrowful and a little lost, but almost disconnected because more often than not, it is the kids who need to be able to grieve. You lose students to other schools as their parents' marriages disintegrate, and they move. Some have such dysfunction at home that they have no shot at functioning at school, and they drift away or go abruptly in a discipline firestorm or running from truancy. I don't ever get used to any of those things, but I have learned to keep moving forward and try to help those I can help and those that want to be helped or supported.

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