“Whoever
welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me
welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
St. Mark 9:37
“We’re
taking a bit of a chance on him,” the headmaster told me, “It will probably be
a tough adjustment. Make sure you keep
an eye on him.” Joey, let us call him,
was one of the students assigned to my advisory group at Saint James
School. We classed him as a tenth
grader, but he had been in and out of so many schools over the past few years
that it was hard to tell where he actually belonged. My first impression was that Joey was a nice
enough kid, but he couldn’t really understand social cues. He laughed at things that weren’t funny, and
he had trouble following a conversation.
He seemed extremely nervous, shell-shocked almost, always fretting about
whether he would be able to remember when this class met, or what he was
supposed to wear for football practice.
Saint
James is definitely a college preparatory boarding school. We didn’t really have what are termed, in the
trade “second chance students.” The
schedule was tight and there were lots of things to remember, and we left
students to supervise themselves a fair amount of the time.
I did watch out for Joey, though, and I could soon tell that he needed it. Nothing seemed to go right for him. He soon fell far behind in his classes. He was danger in hurting himself and everyone else on the football field. His backpack was like the Bermuda Triangle—things went in there, and never seemed to come out again in one piece. And for much of the time, he was an emotional wreck, breaking down in tears or blurting out inappropriate things in class almost every other day. I met with the assistant head of school and looked at his file, quite a few pages of assorted psychological disorders, lots of meds, a broken home. The kid pretty much had everything stacked against him, and the results we were seeing seemed to fit well into what could be expected.
