Giving my student a glowing report card

This is so strange a transition, like being told one will be divorced, but not quite yet. Though this occurred outside our culpability, though we did nothing wrong, there is shame attached to our facility closing. We depended on this job for stability and purpose, gave ourselves to it only to see it turn unfaithful.

People in the facility keep asking me what I am doing next. I tell them that I don't know what I am doing right now, beyond teaching and continuing to move toward whatever light I am shown. For the last few months, I have left myself Post-Its of chores I need to accomplish--having this student do this assignment, sending this report to my supervisor, and preparing for that. Now, more are about the tasks the state wants me to do to ease our closing. If I do not put these on sticky notes that I can tear to shreds after, I will be too resentful to do them. I complete them because I don't want one of my colleagues to have to pick up my slack, but not because I feel they need to be finished otherwise. I wish to do the equivalent of going entirely limp to make the person trying to drag me away expend the most energy. I suppose that I am not as much of an infant in the depths of a tantrum as I might like to be.

I loathe being made to destroy my classroom. I make this inventory, and someone will stake their claim to my wireless keyboard and desk chair. They may take these out from under me before the facility closes fully. Most of the books in our library will be put in a basement, never again to see the light of day, if they are not thrown directly in a dumpster. (This is not cynicism. We had done exactly this when a director tried to funnel a closed facility's books to us. We had books enough.)

I have already rescued all the curricular DVDs I bought and the books I have written. This is hard enough for me without imagining someone throwing We Shadows into the trash.

The higher-ups keep feeding us pseudo-inspirational pap about how true happiness involves not looking at the past or future but only the present. I have been poor. I do not want to be poor ever again. In the present, they are asking me to enumerate which parts of the classroom that I worked for years to establish can be cannibalized. They'll have to forgive me if I am a bit tetchy. Every day, all anyone talks about is closing our facility. I am not being offered a stable, comfortable present.

It has been weeks of people from on high murmuring that they support us while having no way to do this. We at the facility were surprised, but the state government was well-aware of what they were about to do. They could have announced the proposed closure and had paperwork and job offers at the ready. They did not. Closing us was all they considered. Helping us survive was a distant afterthought, one that they have yet to fully have. We, in short, don't matter to the Grand Bureaucracy. How many textbooks I have matters to them. That they are taking away my job is irrelevant, and every "We R Here 4 U!" is an insult without sincere follow through.

Red Hook is semi-officially designated as the facility that protects and cares for the more vulnerable children in New York's juvenile justice system. We have a proven track record of helping intellectually and emotionally disabled residents gain the skills needed to leave the system for good and move toward an independent, law-abiding life. As the only non-secure facility in the system, we fill an essential niche, educating and providing services for those transitioning back into the community or other placements. Without a non-secure, the system is dangerously stratified.

Perhaps most importantly, we are acknowledged as the facility that best works with LGBTQIA residents. On the official website, it reads, "In addition to a focus on trauma-informed care, RHRC is also known throughout the state for its ability to work effectively with gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth." Other facilities have not shown this efficacy in caring for this population. If we are no longer open, this population will be shunted into inappropriate placements to their infractions or those unable to treat them with the dignity they deserve. Without Red Hook, The Office of Children and Family Services becomes another system that could not help them when they desperately needed it.

OCFS is not in the business of housing children. We care for them, sometimes becoming the first adults who have met their needs. We are often the final opportunity of these children to have lives of purpose. Without Red Hook, it is hard to argue that these residents--particularly the LGBTQIA ones--may not survive. We seek to save the lives of students who have never felt at home or welcome anywhere else, who blossom in their months at this facility. According to The Trevor Project, these children are three times more likely than their heterosexual peers to seriously contemplate suicide and almost five times as likely to attempt it. In my years here, I have taught residents who turned to sex work and violent crime to try to cope with parents who abandoned them for their gender or sexuality. I have listened as a young trans girl weep, knowing that she would have to leave Red Hook for an uncertain future that brought her near to killing herself before. We must demonstrate compassion for the needs of these students who are on this precipice. We cannot allow this budget to cause them to be abandoned yet again, not with lives on the line.

Being around my students is challenging because some of them will be sent to more secure facilities where they will be ruined. The kids have no idea how bad it will get. Kids will die. Maybe kids that I have in my classroom today. It is rarely easy, but I have seen kids using the stable foundation of our facility to begin clawing their way out of the lives they had been leading before adjudication.

Every day here, we are no longer managing a facility but planning a funeral for a terminally ill family member.

Every morning, I feel anxious before going to work. Not because there will be a big announcement -- the state made their big announcement and now wishes to be in another time zone when it comes to the aftershocks -- but my coworkers are losing what loyalty they had. They still want to help these students, but they do not wish to extend themselves for a system that gave up on us for so little. (I do not think these closures have much to do with the budget. COVID is being used as an excuse to do what members of Cuomo's administration wanted since they were hired: funnel kids to expensive private for-profit placements on the taxpayer's dime and pretend the New York's children don't commit crimes or need help.)

I have witnessed a hundred boys who, once they receive a release date, burn every relationship here to the ground. They are no longer going to be a part of Red Hook, so they want to posture how unbothered they are about leaving when they are devastated, anxious about an uncertain future, and can't articulate it. Though my coworkers are, one hopes, more self-actualized than dysregulated teens, I expect to see some version of this. It won't be toward one another, but a guard who is told that they will jump to a new placement may well exhaust themselves making perfectly clear how much this facility deserves to be reduced to rubble.

My job is not different in an hour-to-hour sense, but we are all waiting for the letter or call that will pull us away from here. Next week, we could be operating with a skeleton crew. Or not. We don't know and cannot plan for this. We are told a less rosy picture during another meeting, how maybe we want to say to the state that we want lower salaries or drop our pay grades, so we are more attractive to other state agencies. They can't tell us to do this, of course, and we have salary protection, but it's hard to protect a salary if nowhere accepts your transfer. It is red tape and technicalities. "Oh, you have a guaranteed job... but we never guaranteed you a good job anywhere near your home that pays anything like your current salary. And if you decline a job, we take you off that list and no longer have to help you." (They did, in fact, promise that our salaries would not be affected and more than suggested that they would find us new jobs in the counties we selected. This is apparently just something they say.)

The best they can say for teachers is that they will shove what should be non-secure kids into secure placements, so someone ought to need certified teachers for that. But a penny-pinching state might think nothing of distributing twenty new residents two at a time in ten extant classrooms rather than hire me to teach them. It does make financial sense, and that is what matters. Not the human cost. The system needs more guards than teachers, and it is presently balking at absorbing even them. One of the higher up frankly said that he is looking at thirty-five displaced teachers and far fewer openings, so some of us will be out of luck.

I am not without hope, but I am apt to grow increasingly frustrated by a conspicuously inefficient process. They've had years of practice closing redundant facilities--which mine is not. It is astounding and suspicious that they haven't refined this and are instead acting as though they have never done it before. How can one do other than side-eye someone who works for Human Resources but is taken by surprise at the concept of reassignment? It does not spare our feelings if that is the intent. If you are mercenaries, do your job and stop pretending it is compassion.

Days after I was told that Governor Cuomo proposed to close my facility, I was scheduled to get the first of two COVID vaccines. If I were asked a month ago, I would have told you that this felt like the beginning of freedom. It wouldn't be enough to have my life return to something like the normality I experienced before, but it would be a start.

Now, it felt like something that had to be done, but not in itself meaningful. It had no more emphasis than any vaccine as I drove up to the site, a closed JC Penney's in the mall. (The store was closed by COVID, so it might have felt a touch more poignant.) Like a church, I assume any large retail store isn't vacated as much as desacralized, made into a shell suitable only for a Spirit Halloween pop-up.

I had been to this mall more times than I could count, but it had been a long while. The geography of it confounded me. I parked and estimated I could get to the store by the appointed time, but the upstairs entrance was closed and papered over. I made my way downstairs, finding the same treatment. To get to an exterior door--the only other option--I would have to run halfway around the mall and halfway back, which would be both undignified and would make me late. It was not clear how stringent these appointment times were. When I received the email that they were opened, I clicked it immediately and filled in my information as swiftly as I could manage. When I returned to the initial page, all six-hundred openings were taken. It had been a minute and a half. I could extrapolate from this that they expected my punctuality.

Then I saw a young woman walk toward a corner next to the closed storefront and disappear. Of course, having worked in a mall in my youth, I knew that there were back exits customers were not meant to use.

I followed her at a respectful distance, and she did not question it. I approached her and asked how I might most efficiently get outside. She found me at once innocuous and pointed me there as though my presence made perfect sense--or was, at least, not her fault.

I knew I had come to the right entrance when I saw the police, with restrained fatigue and threat, explaining to an elderly Hispanic woman and her irate son that they could not walk in and be vaccinated, a claim they refused to believe. White and holding a piece of paper as though it absolved me of any trickery, I walk between the cops and to the volunteer behind them.

"I have a piece of paper," I said, holding it up. It had my reservation time and a QR code, as good as a golden ticket.

He looked down at his list. "Your name isn't here."

"But I do have a piece of paper."

He looked at the clipboard again. Had the list respected my piece of paper and added my name? It had not. "Why are you here?"

"I'm a teacher." He consulted the list again. I gestured to my outfit, having come straight from work: a sport coat, black slacks, and a button-up shirt. "Don't I look like a teacher?"

His mouth twisted thoughtfully. "You do look like a teacher." He directed me through the doors to the fury of the people still being brushed off by the police.

Once inside, I was passed from person to person in a line. Fill out this form, stand over there, follow her, follow him, stand again. One of the initial people with clipboards found my name and asked for no other information, so cunning was my teacher's disguise.

After spending so long outside the company of others, this near assembly line of strangers held an odd pleasure. Even when I was a mallrat, I don't think I felt this charge standing in a JC Penney's.

At last, I was seated in front of a woman--I thought she was older than me, but it is impossible to know for sure given that everyone is masked (perhaps it was a Spirit Halloween).

Though the process of getting the shot takes fewer than two minutes, I somehow turned the conversation to my job woes. The nurse found me affable and the conversation, brief though it is, climaxes in her agreeing that my facility should stay open and that I am a good teacher.

Now, if I can only get the rest of the state to agree.

last watched: Captain America: The First Avenger
reading: Lolita: The Annotated Edition