How It Ended#

In 1994, Washington State passed a massive bill reforming children’s mental health services. Many of the existing institutions were gutted, programs shut down, and vulnerable children were forced out of places of refuge and safety. The existing statewide system of non-profits, some of which had operated for more than a century, was replaced by for-profit providers working on the free market, bidding to providing the cheapest care for at-risk, often abused, children with severe mental health needs.

This is not a blog post about that reform. This is not a blog post about what happened to those children after the bill was passed. This is not a blog post investigating the harm that is caused when privatization is allowed to run rampant and take over critical care for children.

This is a blog post about the final two years in one of the classrooms in one of those non-profit ran institutions.

McGraw Day School#

Seattle Children’s Home is a very old institution. Through many different programs, they have been helping children in Seattle since 1886 and to this day they continue their mission, albeit now as a division of Navos. The program of interest to this blog post was their McGraw Day School. It was run in cooperation with Seattle Public Schools, serving as a school of last resort for children with serious behavioral problems - the last step before being completely expelled from public school. They used what would now be called a “Collaborative Care Model” The McGraw Day School’s treatment program had psychiatrists, mental health counselors, and teachers, all working together, every single day, to help kids learn the skills they needed to re-enter mainstream schools.

That sounds fancy on the tin, but I was there, as a kid. I was there as a kid who promised himself that I would never forget what it was like to be a kid. All the adults around me had obviously forgotten, so I promised myself I wouldn’t. Here is what I remember.

The Classroom#

The classroom was lovely. Bean bags. No desks. Fuck desks. God whoever purchased those beanbags was a genius, they allowed us to wiggle non-stop. The feeling of the room was soft and inviting. The west facing walls had windows; the door was on the south wall. The beanbags were in the northwest corner. In the middle of the west wall were the rules of what we needed to accomplish to get through each step of the program. The program was structured as a level system. Each level granted more permissions, a higher allowance, and higher expectations.

There were only 5 or 6 of us in the classroom. Two teachers and a councilor. One teacher was named Vicky. I forget the other teacher’s name. I never got along with the other teacher. The councilor’s name was Martin.

There was a one way mirror for discrete viewing of the students. We all knew it was there, and the viewing room on the other side was mostly used for storage. If I recall correctly, some traditional school desks were stored there.

There was another classroom next to ours. I never saw or heard anyone in it, but sometimes there was evidence of it being used, mostly computer screens that had been left on. I had very good hearing as a child and I could tell if a CRT was on in any nearby classroom.

Why We Were There#

We had problems. All of us. Serious behavioral problems. Some of them were born (mine); some of them were from abuse (many of my classmates). One of the things that set me apart was that I came from a stable home. I had 2 working parents. Yes, one of them was a functioning alcoholic and the other suffered from her own complex set of personal challenges, but they loved me and they kept it together a lot better than many of the other parents I knew¹.

Most of the kids around me, no. A lifetime of abuse led to broken kids. 6 hours of intense therapy every day was meant to help. For some of the kids, after 6 hours of safety, they rode a bus to a house where they would get beaten on, or worse.

Related. Fuck every politician who has made cuts to DSHS. Martin would make visits to kids homes to check up on them. I would overhear him talking about what he saw. From DSHS’s perspective, if there was a roof and food, that was enough, nothing could be done to rescue kids from horrible shitty places. DSHS was overworked, overburdened, no time, no resources. My friends suffered for the state’s lack of fucks and ongoing cuts.

Why I Was There#

Today every new parents’ guide tells you about validating kids’ emotions and feelings. Parents are warned that gifted kids have a gap between emotional maturity and vocabulary. Parents are told to look out for communication problems that can lead to anger.

Yeah that wasn’t being taught 40 years ago. There is a good chance that, with modern knowledge about raising a gifted kid, I wouldn’t have had such severe behavioral problems. I had a range of issues, but most of them stemmed from sensory over stimulation² and not being able to communicate my thoughts to the adults around me.

One interesting bit of pop psychology I’ve since learned is that the more often a brain experiences given emotions, the easier it is for the brain to go down that same path. If you are angry a lot, it is easier to get angry. If you are depressed a lot, it is easier to fall into depression even after leaving it.

So, after a few years at being pissed off all the time, anger became my default go to emotion.

Why My Classmates Were There#

Abuse. Physical. Sexual. Abandonment issues. Thrown to the foster care system. Largely abandoned by those who were supposed to protect them. Damn good reasons.

What The School Was Like#

Academics wasn’t a focus. I remember Vicky giving us math lessons a handful of times. We had a daily therapy circle. We learned to talk about our emotions. We sat down and said what we had accomplished each week. We had meltdowns. A lot of meltdowns. All the school’s staff were trained in pinning students down and taking us (kicking, screaming, biting, scratching) to the crisis room. I do not remember its actual name (it might have been called the crisis room) but I remember what it looked like. Soft lighting. Curved carpeted walls. It was designed to be relaxing, and it did its job very well.³

In between having students fighting each other (surprisingly rare) or fighting the staff (more common) we did some truly wonderful things as a class.

Climbing#

We went rock climbing. Martin started us at Vertical World, we learned to belay each other, and then one day we were all driven out to a 50ft cliff face and a bunch of 8 and 9 year old kids got into harnesses and one by one we did our best to climb straight up.

Most of us didn’t make it. I did. I remember how everyone cheered as I got closer and closer to the top. I remember feeling that my topping that cliff was something greater. I knew I was there representing all of us. My classmates stood below me cheering me on. And then I touched the top. I can still picture the view to this day. The trees stretching out before me. I took in the view, then started the decent. I remember repelling down, pushing off the cliff face, letting the rope out a bit, down down down. I had a minor (reasonable) fear of heights. I still do. Going down was psychologically more work than going up.

When I reached the bottom everyone was so happy, so excited, we had done it, we had supported each other and this was something we had done together.

So much was like that.⁴ We were going through this program together. Going through the levels, when someone was going to have a melt down, another kid would run up, “please don’t, you are so close to the next level, just 2 more days, you can do it.” We wanted each other to succeed so much.

When one of us did something hurtful that made another student have a meltdown, the instigator also felt bad. We were responsible for another kid’s failure. “It wasn’t his fault, I was upset so I said something to made him angry, it shouldn’t count against him”.

The teachers would explain that it was our responsibility to not get mad when someone else did something wrong to us. No it wasn’t fair, but that is how the world outside the school was going to be, so we had to learn to adapt to it.

Hatchet#

It was a mixed age classroom. I imagine this made assignments difficult. The school had a tiny library, very tiny but cozy. Five or six students and a teacher could all fit comfortably in there. At one point we read Hatchet, I, of course, loved it. Then we watched the movie. When his campsite caught on fire I yelled out “pee on it!” The room full of ~9 year-olds burst into laughter. So did Martin. When he eventually recovered he said normally I’d get in trouble for that, but it was funny so I wouldn’t, but please don’t say it again. Of course someone else said it again, but it landed flat. We then finished the movie.

The New Kid#

At one point we got a new kid in the classroom. He was 5. He came with a personal aid.

When we saw him join the classroom, all of us kids looked at each other and realized something was fucked up. This was a school of last resort. 5 year olds were not supposed to be there. If he was here, that meant there was no other place to put him. We were horrified. Even at our age, we knew that things should not be going that badly for a kid that young. As far as I recall, none of us ever messed with him. I’m pretty sure if any of us had tried, that one person would have been instantly jumped by the other 5 kids in the classroom.⁵

The Egg Drop Contest#

An egg drop contest was announced. There was a covered bridge connecting the 2nd floor of the main building to the 1st floor of a nearby building (we were on Queen Anne Hill, perfectly normal). From that bridge we’d drop our eggs and see whose survived. I took my egg, surrounded it with Nickelodeon Gak(TM), placed the bundle in a giant plastic Easter egg, and then the aid to the new kid wrapped that in about 10 layers of duct tape.

It survived all the drops. I won the egg drop contest. To this day I credit the Gak, but really it was probably the excessive amount of duct tape.

Occupational Therapy#

For most of my life I had terrible balance. McGraw had an OT on staff, so OT was part of the services provided. Everyone loved OT, it was fun. We got to play games and roll around in barrels. Had screening for social skills deficits been a thing in the early 90s - and curriculums to help with those deficits existed - we might have learned something useful. But none of that existed 33 years ago, so now and then we went and played around for half an hour or so.

The occupational therapist had me do balance exercises. They didn’t help. Turns out my lack of balance is because I wasn’t engaging my glute minimus. I had a physical therapist figure this out a couple years back and now my balance is fine.

She also tried to help with my hand writing. Again, not that helpful. A Reddit TIL post from years back mentioned that bad handwriting can be from holding the pencil too tight and pushing it too hard into the paper.

Yeah, that was a large part of my problem. Thank you random Reddit poster.

I don’t want to disparage the work she did, she was a wonderful person and a joy to be around, a visit to OT always brightened a kid’s day.

The Kitchen#

The head cook was named Doug. Doug is amazing. He made sure that every day we had good food to eat. Many of us suffered from a lack of control in our life, but Doug found a way to give us some control back. Sometimes that meant the cucumbers were unpeeled and cut extra thin because one of us would only eat cucumbers prepared exactly that way (me), other times that meant always having a favorite dish on hand or taking requests to have chili served the next day. (Doug made really good chili).

Everyone loved Doug. I hope he knows how huge of a difference he made in the lives of so many kids.

The Shop#

Each week we earned an allowance. The higher the level a kid was on, the more they got in weekly allowance. Money was spent at the school shop. It was filled with silly things, but we valued the opportunity and always looked forwards to a visit. It was designed to teach us the obvious lesson about willpower - to think big and save up for long term goals. The amount of allowance per level was non-linear, so as you went up in the levels (4 of them if I recall) you suddenly had a lot more money to spend. The store was filled pencils, fancy pens, candy, that sort of thing. But in our limited world, we valued the opportunity to save and spend the money we had earned.

Lemmings#

Vicky had brought in her Atari ST and a number of game disks, one of which was Lemmings. Playing on the Atari ST was presented as a reward for good behavior. The kid in the class I was closest to and I started playing it together. For those who haven’t played it before - Lemmings is Hard. Old school unforgiving, difficult, punishingly hard.

I remember my friend yelling out at me when I was starting to lose it in class one day, asking me to keep it together, we had another level to complete, we were so close. If I acted out now, we wouldn’t be able to play together.

I don’t know how much of the bonding was intentional by the staff, versus how much of it was just the cohort of kids that happened to end up together. I do remember us playing a lot of Lemmings.

What The Adults Couldn’t Do#

At some point, all of us kids realized the adults didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Yes Martin cared for us, a lot. After all he was putting up with a truly huge amount of bullshit from us, we knew we were little shits and we knew we had problems that needed fixing. We also realized the design of the program itself was reasonable, it all made sense, and so far it seemed to be working. Martin was teaching us a toolkit to manage our emotions, and the program and the teachers were there to reinforce those lessons. Our cohort had been together maybe a year or so, and we could see gradual improvements in each other.

But holy cow every adult in the building was wildly incorrect about what was causing us to misbehave. We didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what our problems were, but we knew that it wasn’t what the adults were saying the problems were! We would overhear them talking to parents, and their explanations were often just wrong.⁶ So some of us made a pact that we’d support each other to get through this. Even if the adults were wrong, they were still trying to help, but if we wanted to get better, we needed to figure it ourselves.

Other Odds and Ends#

There was a gymnasium. We sometimes played games in it. With a classroom of 6 kids with anger issues and minimal impulse control.

We had cooking classes, there was a full learning kitchen.

Martin took us camping and taught us wood whittling. He trusted a bunch of kids with histories of violence with sharp knives. We all realized what that meant, none of us betrayed that trust.

We had classes in knot tying.

Writing this, I just realized Martin may have been in boy scouts.

The waiting room for the psychiatrist was huge. The building it was in was old, really old, and the windows went up seemingly forever. They had these huge curtains that came down, dusty, old.

Some music students came in to teach us Piano. I enjoyed the classes a lot and was doing well. The program was cancelled after only 2 sessions. I never found out why.

There was a conference room with a TV that the teachers would plug an NES into with only a handful of games. We only got 15 or so minutes to play, typical adult stuff where they didn’t realize how long those games actually take to get into. The only game worth playing was Mickey’s Adventures in the Magic Kingdom.

We never saw anyone else. I don’t know how the teachers arranged it, but it felt like we had the entire property to ourselves.

I still sometimes dream of walking around the campus.

The End#

One day the announcement came. The program was shutting down. We were going to be forced back into regular schools. Back to the schools that we had already been kicked out from. We could all tell the teachers were upset, they tried to say we were ready, but we knew we were not. We knew the program, we knew our level of self control, we could see marked on the wall how long our streaks of good behavior had been. We could see they were lying, upset, and scared for us. We could see they were trying to put on a happy face.⁷

At this point I was the closest to actually graduating. I was asked what type of cake I wanted, I requested a six layer chocolate cake with strawberry filling in between each layer.⁸ Doug made me one. There was a big party in the atrium in front of the school store.

Afterwards#

I transferred into Concord elementary. The drama teacher remembered me from when I had gone there before. I was pulled out of 5th grade to star as Prospero in The Tempest. I went to almost no classes. I remember none of 5th grade except for rehearsals for The Tempest. I am forever thankful to a drama teacher who had absolute faith that students from a largely minority school in a very poor neighborhood would be able to pull off almost the entirety of The Tempest. I will always remember one quote from him - When another student complained to our drama teacher that I was over acting, he replied “You cannot overact Shakespeare!”

After that I got a modem, I started calling local BBSs, then a year later when AOL started offering flat rate unlimited dial up I was part of 1995’s eternal September. I never signed up for drama class again.⁹