Devora Steinmetz reflects on the challenges of the students who “don’t quite fit,” and how that challenge informs the ethic of the school.

Devora Steinmetz serves on the faculty of Drisha Institute in the United States and Israel. She has taught Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yeshivat Hadar, and Havruta at Hebrew University. Dr. Steinmetz is the founder of Beit Rabban, a Jewish day school profiled in Daniel Pekarsky’s Vision at Work: The Theory and Practice of Beit Rabban. She consults for the Mandel Foundation and works at Gould Farm, a therapeutic community for individuals struggling with mental illness.

I

I remember the first time he walked into the classroom. He had tight dark brown curls and piercing brown eyes. His skin was almost translucently fair. Ilan had come for his admissions visit. He walked into the classroom with me and sat with a group of children who were playing a board game. A piece on the board piqued his interest, and he picked it up. The children tried to tell him that the piece was part of the game and needed to be on the board, but it wasn’t clear that he understood. Did this child know about games?

After discussing my concerns with his preschool teacher, I decided to admit Ilan to our kindergarten-first grade class. But it soon became clear that he didn’t know about games, and he didn’t seem to understand other social conventions. If the child next to him was using a green crayon and Ilan wanted it, he would take it from her. The teachers worked closely with him. “Ilan, if you want to use the crayon, ask Donna for it.” So Ilan said “Can I have the crayon” and took it. The teachers worked with him more closely. “Ilan, if you want to use the crayon, ask Donna for it. Wait until she answers. If she says yes, you can take it.”

Ilan would rock in place in the circle. He would cry out over and over if the teacher was writing on the board and shaped her period like a little circle instead of like a dot, the way she usually did. If the picture books on the shelf leaned off to the right one day, instead of to the left as they usually did, Ilan was inconsolable. When the teachers gathered the children together in the park to return to school, Ilan wouldn’t notice.

The teachers were concerned. They weren’t trained to give Ilan the support that they believed he needed, they were worried about the effect of his behavior on the other children, and they were exhausted by his tantrums and by the need to constantly monitor him.

It was clear to me too that Ilan needed intensive work in order to compensate for his lack of understanding of social cues and to help him navigate the frustrations that he experienced when things violated his expectations of the way they should be. And I believed that the sooner Ilan got the help that he needed the more likely that it could make a difference in his development and in his life as he matured. I began to research therapeutic kindergartens to find out which might offer the services that Ilan needed and which might have room for him.

I found myself under pressure on different fronts. The spouse of a prominent board member phoned me to say that he wouldn’t support me if I dismissed Ilan from the school in the middle of the year; I had made a commitment to the family, and I was obligated to keep the child for the year. The teachers were experiencing increasing frustration and concern for Ilan’s well-being. And I believed that Ilan needed a kind of help that, try as we might, we just were not able to provide him.

Meanwhile, Ilan’s parents had engaged an educational psychologist to evaluate Ilan. While the evaluator privately told me that he had no doubt that Ilan had a pervasive developmental disorder and would benefit from intensive specialized support, the report that he gave to the parents made no reference to this and simply recommended that they engage a speech therapist to help Ilan with some irregularities in his articulation. “Often, parents struggle to hear a diagnosis the first time around,” he told me, “so I’ve come to believe that it’s more useful to allow the information to come in stages. If they see a speech therapist, then at some point that person will recommend someone else, and eventually the picture will become clear.” The parents, understandably, took the psychologist’s report to support their belief that Ilan was pretty much on course for his age and would do just fine if he stayed where he was. So I was torn between the parents, the teachers, the lay leader, and my own growing conviction – which accorded with the teachers’ perception – that the parents should be counseled to seek an alternative educational setting for Ilan as soon as possible.

II

“My name is Moshe Eliyahu, but I want to be called Lou. I’m named after my great-uncle.” Lou was a sharp, witty redhead, quick to pick up on everything and lighting up with a little smile of recognition when he thought of something new or saw something in a different way. He was the five-year-old who showed up for Purim in a white sheet with a colander inverted on his head, wearing a sign that said in Hebrew melah Achashverosh – a play on King Achashverosh, using melah (salt) instead of melekh (king). A pun that he came up with himself, his mother assured us, along with the idea for the salt shaker costume.

Academically, Lou soared. But socially he struggled. Lou spoke in an oddly modulated tone of voice. He did things that made other children – and adults – uncomfortable. He would find a tube of lip balm on the floor, screw it open, and take a bite of the balm. He would rip the pages of the book he was reading. He was fascinated by things that other children found disgusting. He had a hard time playing with his classmates. Often, he had what appeared like a tormented look on his face.

One evening, as the school year was drawing toward an end, I got a call at home from Lou’s father. His tone was accusing. “I was reading with Lou before bed, and I saw a bruise on his arm. He told me that he had been in the social hall with the other children, and the teachers weren’t in the room, and there was a couple there that he didn’t know, and he climbed a tall bookshelf and jumped off and fell and hurt his arm. He said he knew it was dangerous but he didn’t care. Why was Lou left alone? Why isn’t anyone making sure he’s safe?”

It had been a very hot day, and the kindergarten-first grade class had gone down to the social hall to get out of the stifling classroom. But I was sure that Lou hadn’t been left alone there. I phoned the teachers at home, something that I only ever did in an emergency. No, they assured me. They had been in the room the whole time, and there weren’t any strangers there. They couldn’t imagine that Lou had done what his father described without anyone having noticed it, though they hadn’t been watching Lou every second.

We agreed that, for the rest of the year, Lou would never be without a teacher. If he needed to go to a bathroom, a teacher would go with him. If he went to another area in the room to play, a teacher would keep an eye on him. I didn’t know what to do. Lou’s father was accusing us of something very serious. And, if Lou had done what he told him he had, he could be in danger. If he hadn’t done it, which we were pretty convinced was the case, he was nevertheless reporting thoughts of doing something reckless. And, since he hadn’t been left alone with strangers, he was describing and likely believing a situation that had never happened – should we be alarmed by his apparent out-of-touchness with reality?

In addition, I was nurturing a young school that was trying to build a reputation. No one doubted the strength of our academic program, but often people wondered whether a strong focus on learning meant a lack of focus on social and emotional development.

While I believed that our school was committed to both, and that there didn’t have to be a trade-off between these two foci, I knew that visitors to the school were only too quick to pick up on any irregularity that they might perceive in the social fabric of the classroom. Often, visitors would ask about Lou – hesitatingly, apologetically, deep into the back-and-forth about what they had observed in the classroom, they would say something about one of the children who seemed to be behaving… a bit oddly. I took pride in our ability to meet the needs of different children, but I knew that Lou’s behavior was off-putting to many prospective parents and raised questions for many visiting educators.

And what about the teachers? Like me, they delighted in Lou’s off-beat humor and piercing intelligence, but they struggled guiding him through transitions. Already, his mother had tried bringing him to school in pajamas, having given up on fighting what must have become a routine morning battle, and asked the teachers to add changing Lou’s clothes to the beginning of their school day routine. Though we quickly put an end to that, now the teachers needed to watch Lou at all times, and they felt vulnerable to accusations of neglecting him and letting him harm himself. The school year was nearly over, so there was no question of allowing Lou to stay for the remainder of the year. But it seemed clear that his parents should be asked to find a different school for the coming year.

III

Ilan and Lou represent two students who attended kindergarten at Beit Rabban in the first years of the school. I have changed their names and identifying characteristics and have fictionalized certain details of their stories, so these portraits should not be taken to describe what actually transpired in either case. Ilan and Lou and a handful of other children posed a deep challenge to me as the school’s leader. In each case, I was torn between multiple pulls – my commitment to the parents in having accepted their child to the school; my commitment to the teachers to help them do the best job they could possibly do for all of the children in the classroom; my commitment to the child to guide them and those who cared for them toward the path that I believed held the best hope for their fullest development. In addition, I depended on the support of my lay leaders, and I was charged with building a young school with a growing but still fragile reputation.

I offer the stories of Ilan and Lou not because I am convinced that I dealt with these two situations in the best way, but because I think that each of these stories raises important issues about how a school decides which children it can serve and which children need to continue their education elsewhere. In this spirit I will share the decision that I made in each case, how I made that decision, and what criteria were most critical to me in thinking about such decisions.

Ilan

Pulled between the layperson who threatened not to support me if I dismissed Ilan from the school and between the teachers who were at their wits’ end trying to deal with Ilan’s disruptive and attention-consuming behaviors, I decided that the greatest need and my first commitment had to be what I felt was best for Ilan. I consulted with a variety of mentors and experts in child development, and I believed that Ilan needed intensive specialized support as soon as possible.

I also hoped that discontinuing his enrollment in the school would compel his parents to seek a more appropriate setting, which I was afraid they wouldn’t do otherwise. I knew that Ilan’s parents wanted what was best for Ilan, but I also knew that they did not recognize the seriousness of Ilan’s special educational needs. It was unfair, I thought, that the psychologist whom the parents had engaged had not been straightforward with them and unfortunate that his very limited recommendation could only be understood by the parents to support their assumption that Ilan could be well-served in a mainstream school. It seemed to me that Ilan’s parents would not seek out a specialized setting unless they were forced to.

But, while I had identified a number of specialized programs that might fit Ilan’s needs, none of them had room for a new child in the middle of the year. Without a good alternative option, I felt that it would be unfair to the family to ask them to withdraw Ilan from the school, despite the difficulty that his remaining in the classroom posed for the teachers. Ilan remained in the school through the end of the year.

Ilan’s parents placed him in a different mainstream day school for the coming school year. I lost touch with the family after that, and I do not know how Ilan did in his new school, whether he ever received additional support, and how he developed as he progressed through school and into adulthood. But I have often wondered how much Ilan might have gained had he received early intervention targeted toward his specific needs.

Lou

After much soul-searching and a consultation with my most valued mentor, I decided that I would ask Lou’s parents to find a different placement for him for the coming school year. I felt that Lou posed too much of a risk for the school – besides the drain that he put on the teachers and the odd behavior that inevitably grabbed the attention of visitors to the classroom, what concerned me most was the possibility that he might engage in dangerous behavior that would be harmful to himself and could put the school and the teachers in a vulnerable position.

I happened to bump into one of the kindergarten-first grade teachers just after I had made my decision, and I told her what I had decided. I expected her to be pleased; after all, she was one of the teachers who had put most pressure on me to dismiss Ilan from the school. Instead, she said something to me that hit me powerfully then and has stayed with me ever since: “Is our school a place only for happy children?”

Lou would stay. I drafted an agreement with the parents. They would need to get a complete evaluation for Lou. If Lou exhibited any behaviors that we deemed to pose a danger to himself or to anyone else, or if he spoke about such behaviors, he would need to leave the school. I wanted to protect Lou and I wanted to protect the school.

I decided to keep Lou in the school because I believed that Beit Rabban was a place that played to Lou’s considerable intellectual strengths and in which his weaknesses – his disorganization, his awkwardness, his difficulty sitting neatly and taking care of his things – compromised him much, much less than they would at a traditional school. At Beit Rabban, I knew that, no matter how odd he appeared to other children, Lou would be seen by them for who he was, an off-beat, smart, thoughtful kid with a neat sense of humor. I believed that, if Lou could stay, the slings and arrows that inevitably hurt all children as they move through the elementary school years would hit Lou less painfully than at any other school. At Beit Rabban, Lou would be different, but he would shine.

So time and again I waited as visiting parents hemmed and hawed and said “I hate to ask this, but . . .” and I would explain that, yes, the child they had noticed was unusual, yes he sprawled on the floor massacring the pages of his humash, but he was brilliant and curious and creative and a deeply sensitive soul – and he belonged in our school.

IV

Deciding whether a school can keep a child who has been admitted and who has begun attending the school is a complex and emotionally wrenching task. The anecdotes that I have offered here illustrate just a few of the competing pulls on the professionals who need to make this kind of decision. In my time serving as head of Beit Rabban, I tried, as best as I could, to keep one consideration front and center. I felt that our job was to do what was best for the child. And I believed that, at the end of the day, that is what the parents wanted from the school as well.

The most challenging and most painful aspect of the process was when the parents continued to believe that the child would be best served at Beit Rabban, but the teachers and administrators believed that the child needed an alternative setting. To imagine that, by asking the child to leave, we were doing what the parents really wanted us to do, despite the fact that the parents desperately wanted the child to stay, can seem patronizing at best and disingenuous at worst. Yet, by entrusting their child to us, I believed that the parents had charged us to do the best we could for the child – and the best we could do could only be the best as we, in dialogue with parents, educators, and other experts, came to understand it. By accepting that charge, I believed that we obligated ourselves to the child – that, as educators, our job was to do our very best to consider what would help the child grow and thrive. And sometimes that meant supporting the child’s parents in navigating a path that was different from what they had set their hopes on.

It is hard to know how “clean” one’s decisions are. Did you do what was best for the child, or did you do what was easiest for you, what kept you safest, what made things least unpleasant with the people you needed to work with? And, of course, you never know whether, even if you truly did what you believed was best for the child, you in fact made the right decision. So these anecdotes and reflections are offered as an exercise in thinking these things through, in foregrounding the way I tried to think about these challenging situations, and in raising questions about how well we can ever make these difficult and complex decisions.