Liz's Final

The Home-Visit

I had driven less than five minutes past the school when the paved road turned into gravel and less than ten when the gravel became dirt. South Warren Elementary School lay ten miles outside of Warrenton, North Carolina; a small town where everyone knows everyone.

It was for this very reason that I had decided to live outside of town and rented a house with four other Teach for America teachers also working in the district. We lived in a house that was typically rented out as a summer home and it rested on the banks of Lake Gaston. Shiny and new, a house with two fire places, a pool table, and a boat dock was more than I dreamed as my first home after college.

Warrenton on the other hand was tiny and falling apart. The Main Street showcased a library, gas station, dry cleaner, hair salon, and a pizza parlor. The elementary school with the highest test scores also sat in town but in order to reach South Warren I needed to drive past Main Street and out onto route 401, a narrow two lane road that ran between cotton and tobacco fields.

Later that year another first-year Teach For America teacher would be killed on her way to school by a logging truck. I thought about her each time I passed the stretch in the road where the tree trunks had lain scattered across the highway like an overturned bucket of Lincoln logs, the truck on its side in the ditch.

The only other notable landmark on this six mile stretch out of town was the Magnolia Manor Plantation. Today it is an upscale B&B; the description on its website reads, “This historic Warren County gem fell into disrepair following the War of Northern Aggression and has been respectfully rehabilitated to its original grandeur.” To earn some extra cash, I once helped cater a wedding at the plantation. A sea of white suits and women in big hats sat under the low branches of the magnolia trees. The men smoked cigars and drank frosty glasses of mint juleps while the ladies sipped lemonade and sweet tea from mason jars.

If you were driving down 401 and not going to the Plantation, you would probably never notice a small street sign on the right that read Parktown Road. This street led further back into the country past the Coley Springs Baptist Church to a fork in the woods. South Warren Elementary School was down the road less traveled and was as far as I ever went until that day.

It was early fall, still warm in North Carolina, and I had my windows rolled down. On the seat beside me lay a pile of homework, blank except for the name Shane scrawled across the top in thick black jagged lines.

During my Teach for America training, various supervisors and mentors reiterated the significance of home-visits. It was a great way to connect with and invest parents and students by showing families that you cared enough to come to them. These visits could be especially important if you lived in an area where the parents may not have access to a car or worked a schedule that did not enable them to attend afterschool conferences or meetings.

So here I was, about to make my first home visit. Shane had not completed his homework in about two weeks and I called his mother to arrange for a meeting. She was thrilled to not have to come to school and a date was set.

Shane Hosgorn’s reputation arrived in the classroom before the boy ever set foot in the building. The first indication that Shane might be a handful came from my teaching assistant. We were making name tags for the tiny blue chairs during teacher pre-service days and I was reading the names off the class roster. When I got to Shane she said, “ooooooooo boy….so we’ve got Shane.” I asked who he was and she hesitated before cautiously replying,”He’s wild….but he’s allright”.

Other reactions were not so generous and the little soon-to-be-first grader quickly had a bulging resume of misdemeanors. “He bites.” “ He steals.” “ He lies.” “He has no friends.” “And don’t expect any help from his mother neither!” His kindergarten teacher from the previous year told me that one afternoon she just could not take him anymore so during lunch she put him in her car and drove him home.

Prepared with a laundry list of warnings, I was amazed when a quiet, blonde boy with a camouflage backpack took a seat in the chair marked Shane. He was one of three Caucasians in the class that year and smaller than the other kids, but anyone who had gone to kindergarten with him knew that you didn’t mess with Shane.

He seemed to have leapt right off the pages of Where the Wild Things Are, and perhaps it is this mental connection that explains why when I think back on his impish grin I see two rows of perfect little fangs. He was Max incarnate and in addition to gnashing his terrible teeth and rolling his terrible eyes he also howled at the top of his lungs, slammed his head on the desk, and sharpened his pencils into spears which he used to repeatedly stab into his notebooks and worksheets.

His handwriting was illegible and he would attack the paper as though he were trying to carve his letters into wood. The result would be deep gouges and slashes in his workbooks, bits of led snapping as Shane slowly pushed his pencil across and into the page, knuckles white from the strain of his grip.

The kindergarten teacher gave me the directions to his home. Just make a right out of the parking lot and drive until the road ends. You’ll see a trailer park; his is one of the first, right under the street light.

It was early in the afternoon and the sun was out. Dust puffed up from the road as I drove across the dirt that was slowly turning grassy. When I reached the trailer park I saw a woman in professional dress getting out of a dark car. Shane was outside with his mother and sister. They had had moved to NC the previous year from Pennsylvania. I would later learn Shane’s biological father was still in Pennsylvania, imprisoned for sexually abusing both children. The kids currently lived with their mother and her boyfriend, both of whom were recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.

I slowed my car to stop, parking a little ways up from the other vehicle, and grabbed the blank homework before getting out of the car. Something was wrong. Ms. Hosgorn stood, sweating in the sun, listening to the woman in the suit, and as I walked over I could see her face begin to change.

I had arrived seconds after a social worker who was there to take the children to foster care as their home was determined unfit for children. The trailer was filthy and the floor covered in dog feces and holes that revealed the ground below. The kids had been sleeping on a couch in the living room and when electricity was shut off this past week the state decided to intervene.

The social worker told the kids to get into her car. Shane’s sister began to quietly acquiesce but little Shane started to writhe and scream for his mamma. Their mother turned to me, cried to me, begged me to do something, anything; they were taking her babies. The next five minutes were a blur of screams and cries, hands being pulled apart and car doors closing and locking. The social worker looked at me her face tired and sad but unapologetic. She got into the car with the hysterical children and dust kicked up from the tires as she drove from grass to dirt and dirt back to pavement.

Once the car was out of sight I realized Ms. Hosgorn was crying on my shoulder. She was hot, sweaty, overweight, and her heart had just been ripped out. I stood dumbly as she sobbed, one hand stroking her back the other holding the forgotten worksheets.

I cried all the way home.

Back in school no one knew any different and I kept Shane’s secret for him. His behavior remained unchanged and a few months later he was back with his mother. Around Thanksgiving social services connected him with a big brother program and he was assigned to an eighteen year old boy named La’Shon. Shane latched onto this older male figure like a barnacle to a rock. He talked about La’Shon constantly, always referring to him as his brother, and used him to threaten other kids. “Don’t do that or my brother will beat you up!”

Occasionally I would receive a note that La’Shon would pick Shane up from school. On these days Shane would talk of nothing else but what he and La’Shon were going to do that afternoon. But, as might be expected of an eighteen year old, something often came up or he would run late and was not there by the end of school. On these afternoons Shane’s tough image was dropped as he hid in the corner where the kids couldn’t see him and cried and cried into his tiny dirty palms.

I wanted to hold him, take him home with me, show him the low hanging branches of Magnolia Manor or teach in to swim in the lake beside my house. Instead I handed him a tissue, put him on the bus, and watched him draw into himself, curling into a tight little ball against the window as the bus drove away from the school and down a paved road that would eventually turn to dirt.