at-risk-students

The cane is just not going to cut it. I shared with some of my colleagues that these brothers live in neighborhoods where they are getting whapped with a piece of stick all night, stabbed with knives, and pegged with screwdrivers that have been sharpened down, and they are leaking blood. When you come to a fella without even interviewing him, without sitting him down to find out why you did what you did, your only interest is caning him, because you are burned out and frustrated yourself. You say to him, __end over, you are getting six._ And the boy grits his teeth, skin up his face, takes those six cuts, and he is gone. But have you really been effective? Caning him is no big deal, because he__ probably ducking bullets at night. He has a lot more things on his mind than that. On the other hand, we can further send our delinquent students into damnation by telling them they are no body and all we want to do is punish, punish, punish. Here at R.M. Bailey, we have been trying a lot of different things. But at the end of the day, nothing that we do is better than the voice itself. Nothing is better than talking to the child, listening, developing trust, developing a friendship. Feel free to come to me anytime if something is bothering you, because I was your age once before. Charles chuck Mackey, former vice principal and coach of the R. M. Bailey Pacers school.

I will always respect Mr. Charles chuck Mackey for the way he dealt with me. His approach was not hostile, rather his approach was one, __ook here, I__ working with you, so I need you to work with me._ He showed me first that he had my back, and it was easy for me to do the same for him. Mr. Mackey was well known in the entire school as a no-nonsense but fair person. There are some school administrators that aren__ intimidating at all, but with Mr. Mackey, it was totally different. When we saw him, even if we were not doing anything wrong and our uniform was intact, we still tend to avoid him by going in a different direction. His presence alone demanded that kind of respect.

My volcano of compress anger was about to erupt in school, and it would take more than five years for my molten lava to be brought under control, which was through the loss of my sight. However, shouldn__ there be a way of detecting and reaching out to kids like me before there is a massive problem? Why wait until there is a devastating eruption before we intervene?