COOKING AND FOOTBALL—those were the two things in which I placed my hopes as fourteen-year-old Tim entered high school. I had many reasons to be concerned about the high school years. Academically, Tim was significantly below grade level. He had low self-esteem, rebelled against rules and authority, and made poor choices in friends and acquaintances. During the past year, as a result of his more emergent bullying behaviors and his inability to conform to rules, he had received two new diagnoses: a personality disorder and oppositional defiant disorder. This was in addition to his previous diagnoses of ADD, depression, and PTSD. He had been in therapy for over three years and was on trazodone to treat his sleep disorder and Adderall for his ADD. He only reluctantly took the drugs prescribed for him because he said they made him tired. Instead, he used marijuana to self-medicate.
But at least he looked forward to cooking and football.
Tim’s first high school—I’ll call it High School 1 to distinguish it from the ones that followed—was a vocational-technical school that was part of a statewide school district. Its principal was a friend of mine. When I visited the school in the summer, he took me aside and assured me that he would do all he could to make Tim’s time there successful. The school had a new culinary arts program, and I was hoping that Tim, who still loved cooking and wanted to be a chef, would have a chance to enroll in it.
The school also had a new football team. When we visited the coach noticed Tim—tall and with an excellent build for his age—and invited him to try out for the team. Tim—who was a good athlete but had never liked team sports—decided to give it a try. Practice began late that summer.
In late August we had a PPT meeting, where we were introduced to the school’s assistant principal—who would oversee much of Tim’s academic program—and other school administrators. They were all cordial as we went to work on his IEP. They crafted an overall education goal for Tim to “develop the necessary work skills and behaviors to maintain competitive employment” and an academic goal “to succeed in mainstream academics with grades of ‘C’ or better in all classes.”
However, there was no explicit mention of the effect of his mental illness on his academic performance. Predictably, our discussion bogged down when we began talking about the supplementary services Tim would need. Linda and I suggested immediate behavioral and academic supports, but the school wanted to do an academic performance assessment during the first three weeks of school before considering these. We agreed reluctantly but requested a peer tutor. The school deferred a response to this until after the assessment was completed. They did, however, assign him to receive two and a half hours per week of special education instruction in the resource room and an hour and three-quarters per week of counseling with the school psychologist.
From the start, Linda and I were concerned about how frequently detentions and suspensions were used for discipline. We explained that Tim needed to spend as much time in class as possible to succeed academically. He was beginning to look at suspensions as a way of avoiding class, and toward the end of eighth grade he sometimes tried to get suspended on purpose. We suggested drafting a behavior support plan that would create alternatives to suspension if Tim broke school rules.
But when we talked about what such a plan might look like, we might as well have been speaking in different tongues. Linda and I knew all about Tim but had only a surface understanding of the school rules. The school knew all about its rules but had only a surface understanding of Tim. We left the meeting without a behavior support plan in place. The school psychologist agreed to contact Dr. D for help in developing one. In the meantime, the school said it would issue Tim a “time-out pass” to allow him to leave a classroom whenever he was upset about something.
Unfortunately, Tim’s fledgling football career ended abruptly. The coach was initially happy to have him on the team. I talked with him about Tim’s illness, and he told me that he thought football might be just what Tim needed. Within a couple of weeks Tim emerged as the backup defensive end and offensive end—one of just a couple of freshmen who had advanced that high on the depth chart. He worked hard in practice, responding well whenever he was praised.
But he did not take well to criticism. When the coaches yelled at him, he refused to practice. When he refused to practice, he was assigned to run laps. When he refused to run laps, he was dropped down the depth chart. By the second scrimmage of the season he was a backbencher, suspended from the game for disciplinary reasons. A week later, the coach declared that “some kids need football more than football needs them” and dismissed Tim from the team.
Tim made it through the first couple of vocational rotations without incident, but his academic rotations did not go as well. I never heard the results of the performance assessment the school conducted, and no peer tutor was ever assigned to Tim. He was cited for failure to pay attention, swearing, and tossing pencils at other students, and all of these transgressions led to detentions. As the detentions added up, they led to lost class time—exactly what we wanted to avoid. As he lost class time, Tim fell behind in his work.
It took a month of pushing before the school psychologist finally spoke with Dr. D. That conversation resulted in confusion. The school psychologist expected Dr. D to offer a behavior plan for Tim, but Dr. D expected the school to draft a plan to which he could react.
After that conversation, the school psychologist finally crafted the goal that “Tim will improve self-esteem, anger control, and problem solving skills.” He created six objectives for Tim: to discuss his personal strengths and to develop strategies to use them to succeed; to discuss situations that caused him to become angry; to develop problem-solving and stress-reduction strategies; to “describe his disabilities independently and accurately to people;” to follow school rules, “including leaving peer situations that are likely to result in rule breakage”; and to “seek the support of staff, teachers, or other responsible parties to process it out” whenever Tim had “a day…in which he believes a behavioral incident to be likely.”
I thought these objectives were unrealistic. How, for example, was Tim supposed to acquire the skills to do any of these things, or to identify through the haze of depression, oppositional defiance disorder, ADD, learning disabilities, and a personality disorder “a day…in which he believes a behavioral incident to be likely”?
And the objectives came at least a month too late. In the first week of October, school officials discovered a small bag of marijuana, a pipe, a lighter, and a burned pencil in Tim’s pocket. They called the police and suspended him for ten days. Tim entered the juvenile justice system for a second time. The pretrial process took almost two months, during which he was ordered to undergo a drug use assessment. When he was determined to be only a casual drug user, he was placed on probation for six months, ordered to attend group counseling (in addition to his individual counseling with Dr. D), and required to submit to periodic drug testing, a curfew, and possible house arrest if he violated the terms of his probation.
Tim served his ten-day suspension from school in late October. When he returned, he was even more behind academically, so the school assigned two tutors to him. One provided twenty hours of tutoring to help him make up the work he had missed while on suspension. The other—his algebra teacher—was supposed to help him with his general academic needs as part of his IEP.
After Tim’s suspension, Linda and I requested a PPT meeting to develop more classroom-work modifications and to flesh out Tim’s behavior support plan to improve the connection between his educational supports and his clinical care. Our goal was to prevent future suspensions. Our requests were denied. The school believed that the tutoring was sufficient to address Tim’s academic needs and that the school’s rule book was sufficient to guide his disciplinary needs. They were treating Tim as they would any other student, they argued. We replied yet again that the purpose of special education was to treat qualifying students differently from other students. And we believed that the rule book could not substitute for a behavior support plan.
The urgency I felt about this increased as Tim continued to violate school rules and the school continued to suspend him for a day or two at a time. His academics declined as he missed more classes. He was in danger of failing several of his courses. While tutoring was technically available to him, he was expected to make use of it voluntarily after school, when the algebra teacher had some free time. But that was also when Tim had to attend his court-ordered group counseling.
He became increasingly pressured, tired, and frustrated. He would often erupt in anger at home and threaten family members. It wasn’t that these outbursts were unpredictable; Tim was like a gathering storm over days and weeks. He might start out somewhat innocuously by refusing to pick up his things, then escalate by taking his siblings’ things without permission, and then further escalate by physically bullying his siblings into doing what he wanted. By the end of the progression, his siblings were afraid of him, and he refused any redirection. Linda had it worse than I did; at one point she even contacted the Department of Children and Families for help, including requesting a wilderness program for Tim and respite services for the family.
When Tim’s academic progress reports arrived in early December, they were bleak. He failed science, phys. ed., algebra, life skills, and geography. He was barely passing English. In the one class in which he got a good grade—reading—his teacher asked that he be removed because of his bad behavior.
We had another PPT meeting to revisit Tim’s IEP. For the first time, Tim attended. He had a single request—to end his sessions with the school psychologist. Three court-mandated group sessions per week and therapy with Dr. D were all he could handle. The school psychologist supported the request. So the school counseling was dropped from his IEP, and Tim left the meeting happy.
We then discussed Tim’s academic issues. The school proposed moving Tim into easier classes to lift his grades. Linda strongly opposed this, arguing that Tim needed adequate supports in more challenging classes, not easier classes without any supports. The school disagreed, with the worst possible result. They decided that Tim would remain in the more challenging classes but without any additional supports or the after-school tutoring, which was discontinued because it conflicted with Tim’s court-ordered group counseling.
We then discussed Tim’s suspensions. Everyone agreed that Tim was being suspended too frequently and needed every available minute in class. The team agreed to the following language:
Tim will not receive any out-of-school suspensions. If his behaviors involve drugs, weapons, severe assault, or any behaviors which violate criminal statutes Tim will be placed in an interim alternative educational placement for up to 45 days. If an interim alternative educational placement is necessary Mr. Gionfriddo agreed for up to five school days for the placement to be implemented. During these five days Tim will be home schooled. Work will be provided by the school.
That seemed pretty clear to me. But just four days later Tim was given an out-of-school suspension for a reason that did not involve drugs, weapons, severe assault, or any criminal behaviors.
The events began when someone called in a bomb threat that resulted in the evacuation of his school. In all the confusion, Tim left the school and asked for a ride home from a student he knew. The student agreed, but the car was overcrowded. An emergency services worker approached the car and asked Tim—the last one in—to get out. Tim did just as he was told but then left school on foot. An administrator called after him to return, but he did not.
When Tim arrived at school the next day, he was given a six-day out-of-school suspension for refusing to follow directions. Linda and I spent the entire day arguing that the suspension wasn’t permitted by the IEP to which the school had agreed just four days earlier. Despite that, the school’s vice principal refused to budge. So Tim happily sat at home for six days.
I was keeping count. Tim had already been suspended for a total of nineteen days, and it was not even the end of December.
When school reconvened after the Christmas vacation a manifestation determination meeting was held to decide if Tim’s behavior was the result of his disability. This time, Linda refused to go, feeling that she would only be wasting her time. I requested that Tim not be given any more out-of-school suspensions because they were making it impossible for him to succeed in school. The members of the team agreed, and the agreement was recorded in the minutes of the meeting. Four weeks later, Tim was suspended again, this time for swearing. Tim’s suspension was to be served in school but outside of the classroom. He was placed in a room with another student. Bored, the boys started tossing pencils at each other. For this Tim received two additional days of suspension, in further violation of his IEP.
His suspension count for the year was now up to twenty-two days, nine of them after the adoption of IEP provisions that explicitly prohibited them.
Tim’s next progress report reflected the results. He failed geography, science, and phys. ed. His reading teacher again asked that he be removed from her classroom. The only class he passed—nominally—was English. The school psychologist and Dr. D exchanged communications during this time. While the school psychologist still blamed Tim’s failing grades on bad behavior, Dr. D tried to steer his academic problems back to the symptoms of the underlying disease: “Tim has little interest in academic issues or his future in general. At this point he is very short sighted and is primarily focused on reducing current psychological and emotional discomfort at any cost. He does this by avoiding any focus on his behavior and by avoiding difficult situations and tasks. The usual consequences of detention and suspension will predictably either have no effect for Tim or will actually worsen his behavior. Detention just gives him more time with the peer group that abhors school and suspension allows him to avoid school altogether.”
During the same period, Tim provided some further insight into his darkening mood with these lines from a poem:
As the calm pack runs through the star lit sky
Their silver fur catches my eye
I get a chill as the deer give a cry
And the hungry pack moves in for the kill.
On the last day of February, the school scheduled a PPT meeting to request a “manifestation determination, functional behavioral analysis and a review of his behavioral intervention plan.” I was told that a behavioral consultant was being engaged to conduct an evaluation of Tim. The school agreed that it would not suspend Tim while the evaluation was being done. Already twice burned on the matter of suspensions, I did not believe them.
To add insult to injury, when Tim finally rotated to the culinary arts program, he was disappointed. The introductory lessons focused on the mechanics of organizing a kitchen. His hopes of being turned loose to create new recipes were dashed. His educational program was a mess. His progress in counseling with Dr. D had stalled. He was becoming more defiant at home. And after he had an altercation with Linda in her home where they came close to blows, she called the Middlefield Resident State Trooper’s Office to intervene.
Tim’s probation officer was well aware of all of Tim’s troubles. At this point, he decided it would be best to send Tim to an inpatient program. After talking with both Linda and me, he notified Tim that he had violated his probation and that because of his drug offense from October, he would have to cooperate with an inpatient admission to a substance abuse treatment program.
Tim was sent to a program an hour away from Middletown. The program described its mission as being “to provide an innovative, high-energy environment within which adolescents can develop new social and behavioral skills helping them to harden their resolve, reinforce their strengths, and refocus their lives.” The only resolve the program hardened for Tim was to disobey rules and chart his own course. There was a reason for this—the program was designed for people who accepted that they had an addiction disorder and were ready for treatment. Because of this, the residential facilities were not locked. Tim did not have an addiction disorder at the time—he was a casual user—and he was not ready for treatment. And an unlocked door to him was an invitation to explore the outside world.
Tim was expected to be in the program for three to six weeks. He stayed ten days. He left his supervised group home one night to go bar hopping. When he returned, he was immediately discharged from the program.
Under the terms of his probation, he was now put under house arrest. He was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet and was not permitted to leave my house except to go to therapy. It was a three-week vacation for Tim, but I felt imprisoned. At certain times of the day, a commanding computerized voice would interrupt my telephone conversations, ordering me off the phone so that the bracelet’s signal could be tested. This did not deter Tim. One day when I was running some errands, he arranged for a delivery of marijuana through a downstairs window.
A week later, Tim’s high school provided a grade report for the year. Tim had failed every subject. Only his science teacher made a positive comment, indicating that Tim “actively contributes.”
High School 1 wasn’t working, so Linda searched for an alternative. She wanted something closer but eventually settled on an “emotional growth” boarding school in the northwestern part of the United States as the best option for Tim. I did not want him so far away but did not have an alternative to suggest, so I went along. The school—I’ll call it High School 2—agreed to admit Tim. The court ordered the placement, and the school district agreed to pay part of the cost. And so, when he was released from his house arrest, Tim headed west.