Caught

 Cathy is a third grader. She is very smart, or at least gives every impression of being smart. Her attendance has made it difficult to accurately track her progress as she moves from primary to upper grades. This is a trait she shares with a number of our students. Transiency, or the flitting in and out of enrollment, has become an even stickier wicket since COVID. For example: One of a pair of divorced parents may have moved away during the past few years, leaving a primary care giver. Which is not terrifically unusual except when the primary care giver turns out to be the less reliable of the two. 

So we work with what we have. In Cathy's situation, her dad has just recently moved back into the picture, and now we have an additional number we can call if there is a problem at school. Unfortunately, there have been a few of those, not the least of which has been her spotty attendance. Most recently, her classmates ratted her out for bringing a vape pen to school. They did this after being told by Cathy that she had "something cool" to show them. Rather than make a big scene, we quietly cut Cathy out of the line to PE so that she could have a quick chat with our Restorative Justice coordinator. 

That conversation yielded a number of different versions of "the truth." Happily, she was initially forthcoming with the vape pen. She handed it over abruptly. Then there were a variety of reasons that she brought the prohibited item to school. At first she swore that her older sister made her bring it. After a couple tests of this theory, she shifted the blame to her younger sister. She seemed to be as shocked and appalled at the appearance of this device as we were. Except that all her classmates insisted that she wanted them all to see what she had brought from her house, which didn't jive well with the naivete. In order to get to the source of the confusion, we called home. 

Mom seemed aghast, but tossed this curve ball over to dad, whose new number she was happy to hand over. That call resulted in setting up a meeting the following afternoon with our principal. Since the vape pen was no longer in Cathy's possession, there was no rush to get to the bottom of the situation. Not on dad's part, anyway. 

At the meeting, dad's first concern was that someone had put the vape pen in Cathy's backpack. Our principal waited him out on this one, while the reality of absent parents sank in for everyone. The vape pen came most certainly from the older sister, who was still too young to possess such an item. The hope that Cathy's native intelligence might carry her through elementary school with such a spotty attendance record loomed in the background. Suspending her was never on the table, since that would mean sending her home to a lack of supervision and who knows when she might be seen again. 

And what she might be missing.

And what she might be concealing.