The Boy with the Backpack

It’s a story that never leaves me:

A high school teacher asked a boy about his homework. He did not have the homework. The teacher chastised him, and the boy blew up. He was standing near the teacher. When he threw his backpack over his shoulders, it hit the teacher. She was a smallish woman, and the impact knocked her to the floor.

Someone in the boy’s punishment process suggested mediation. The teacher only agreed to it for the sake of her class. She didn’t want the image of herself on the floor to be the student’s final impression of the event. And even though by now she was afraid of the student, she was the adult, required to set models for behavior and problem-solving. She realized that this was a problem that mediators knew how to solve better than teachers.

Kelley Hodge introduced me to the Good Shepherd Mediation Program. Hodge ran the Office of Safe Schools Advocate, under Pennsylvania’s agency for juvenile justice, from December 2011 to August 2015. She’d worked in Philadelphia’s DA’s office, and before that she’d been a prosecutor in Municipal Court, including Juvenile Court. Like many lawyers I worked with during my year-and-a-half stint on the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, Hodge introduced me to the reasoning and analysis that underpins our social contracts and institutions. She talks in long sentences with well-considered and grammatical independent and dependent clauses, and in paragraphs that make specific and clear arguments.

I was not always up to taking it all in, and I remember some of our best conversations at 5:30pm, when she’d mostly done a very big, often heartbreaking, To Do list, and I was driving home in the car, listening to her voice on the little black speaker I clipped to my car’s sun visor. Then, I could hear her. At the end of the day, she was still a fierce advocate, and a woman who’d absorbed great waves of grief and anger from families whose children had been hurt, often badly and deeply hurt, but she was also more likely to laugh or sigh or tell me little anecdotes when I couldn’t take any more Big Ideas, but like the writer that I am, needed illustrations.

Hodge also funneled into the School Reform Commission’s Safety Committee a line of practitioners whose work sprang up next to the high stonewall of the courts. Good Shepherd Mediators was one such. At the time my husband’s church was also called Good Shepherd, and we’d begun to accept shepherd chachkas into our lives, not a collection so much as a motley group of objects that reminded us, like Isaiah, that “we like sheep have gone astray, every one to his own way.”

On the day I visited Good Shepherd, Cheryl Cutrona, one of the mediators, used the case I described above in her opening presentation, explaining, among other things, that mediation requires action, and almost always reveals new information.

In the case of the boy with the backpack, mediators found out that far from his not caring about the class, he’d been overwhelmed with anxiety. His mother had engaged a tutor for him to try to help him do better, and on the day in question, he had completed the homework, after much hard work, but had forgotten to bring it to school, and was furious and frustrated to find himself in class with no evidence of that effort. The teacher, of course, hadn’t known this.

After the mediation, the boy was required to make amends, and he agreed to work with the teacher in her charitable volunteer activity. At the boy’s expulsion hearing, it was the teacher who then argued for his reinstatement to the school.

It was the appropriate, open end of a story about process and relationship. We talk about “teachable moments,” but this teacher and this student really transformed conflict into new hope. Was the student allowed back into his school? That I don’t know.

Lorene Cary is a founder of SafeKidsStories. She teaches writing at UPenn. Her latest novel is If Sons, Then Heirs.