In Brooklyn, public school’s been up and running for almost two months now, and I can’t stop thinking about Jmyha Rickman. She’s the 8-year-old Illinois schoolgirl who threw an epic tantrum last year and was hauled out of Lovejoy Elementary in handcuffs. On Facebook, comments ranged from “that kid needs a whupping” to “what kind of crazy racist monsters call the cops on a third-grader?” I didn’t comment. I was too busy freaking out. My boy could be next.
My 8-year-old is That Kid. The one who drives the teachers crazy. At best, he’s the class clown. At worst, he gets suspended for a fistfight with the other kid in his grade who can’t stay out of trouble, either. Last year there were 17 official incident reports.
What’s going on? Despite some $20,000 in professional assessments, the reasons my son acts out are still not entirely clear. He’s definitely extremely anxious about school and has been since a drill-sergeant-style preschool teacher traumatized him at age 3, which kicked off the behavior problems.
Ultimately, the why’s are irrelevant. It’s the “what now?” that concerns me. We’re still in that start-of-school honeymoon period, though Halloween is usually when he starts to take off the “good student” mask. Will this be the year he’s cuffed and carted out? And what about all the other kids like him?
Handcuff worries may be overblown, in my case. My son is 70 pounds, the same size as Jmyha was, and, like her, he’s occasionally out of control. But he’s white, and I’m an Ivy League educated editor with the cell numbers of friends at large media companies and law firms on my iPhone. Race and class privilege may keep him out of jail.
[For more of this story, written by Louise Sloan, go to http://parenting.blogs.nytimes....S.&pgtype=Blogs]
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