When the Sheriff Isn't Woody

Eliot once wrote a story about his heroes from the movie Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear was his favorite, but he liked Woody too. He wrote, “Woody plays the guitar and walks funny.” Two years later, Eliot could have been Woody; he carried a toy gun, played the guitar, and walked funny. Too bad the sheriff who came to see him when he acted out at school wasn’t Woody.

The spring of his fifth grade year things fell apart in the classroom. Eliot was kicking and punching his teachers, and although his strength was not intimidating, the behaviors were. His third grade teacher Robin had showed me what it took to deal with autistic kids’ behaviors: training, love, and confidence. She talked with her students, physically guided them if she needed to, and let them know who was boss. In an age of liability where physical contact with students was all but forbidden, Robin understood its importance. With Mitchell who used behaviors to communicate the emotions he couldn’t express with words, Robin sat with him on the therapy ball during circle time. She put her arms around him and sang. It was impromptu physical therapy and bodily control, and Robin used it intuitively. By understanding Mitch, she not only controlled his behaviors but allowed him to thrive in the classroom. There was no lawsuit when the parent was happy.

The more Eliot kicked and punched, the more power he gained and the teachers lost. Eliot’s teacher called for me to come pick him up. At first I refused, telling the teacher (whose name I will not use for the sake of her privacy) that for Eliot being picked up early was a reward. I hoped she and her advisors would come up with strategies to turn Eliot’s behavior in a positive direction. But the kicking and punching continued. Blue and I ended up picking him up many times, and the teacher began putting him in restraint.

Restraint was the last resort, and knowing this, Eliot’s teacher went to her supervisor for help. The supervisor suggested suspension. I was appalled. Going home, which was a reward for Eliot, was not a solution.

I called for a Functional Analysis and Behavior Intervention Plan, which we had last implemented when Eliot was in kindergarten. It meant that a behaviorist came into the classroom and worked with the teacher to turn the student around. The strategies devised would become part of Eliot's education plan for years to come.

Despite several requests for the functional Analysis, which I also put in writing, it took three weeks for Eliot's IEP team to secure the first meeting. By then repeated restraints had traumatized Eliot, and the same supervisor who had called for suspension made another unimaginative suggestion. She said it was time to call the sheriff. Was this the best the administration could come up with in a severely handicapped classroom, which Eliot attended for behaviors in the first place?

Fear of litigation was the real reason teachers were required to call the sheriff when a student became physical, but if the administration took a proactive approach to special education, they wouldn’t have to spend so much time doing what Mitch’s mom referred to as “putting out fires.”

Eliot didn’t understand the seriousness of the sheriff’s visit, and he obsessed on the sheriff’s gun. Anticipating this, I had asked the sheriff if he could leave the gun in the car, which of course he could not. After his visit with Eliot he called me to let me know how concerned he was about Eliot’s obsession. I understood his concern, but knew he had missed the point when I had to convince him Eliot wasn’t going to show up in a trench coat the next day and mow everybody down.

The day I pulled Eliot out of school was the day his teachers called the sheriff the third time. I was there when the sheriff, a woman this time, pulled up. She was the opposite of the first one. She stood leaning against the gate enclosing the yard outside Eliot’s classroom so that he could not see her gun. She asked him if he understood how serious it was that she had to come to an elementary school to talk with him, when there were people out there doing really bad things she needed to deal with.

“How bad,” he asked.

“Really bad,” she said.

“Do you have a gun?”

She was smart enough not to answer that question right away.

“Are you going to take me to jail?” This must be what the other helpful officer had said.

“No, I’m not going to take you to jail,” she said.

I walked her out to her car and thanked her for being understanding with Eliot. I told her about the first sheriff’s reaction to Eliot’s obsession, and she shook her head. “The first things students always ask me about is my gun,” she said.

So it was that for the last three weeks of the school year I did Touch Math with Eliot every morning. This was not something I would have chosen. It was not just that I coveted my weekday surfing hours, but that I felt that a little stress in school helped Eliot deal with stress in life. But the key words were “a little.” If he was kicking and punching on a regular basis, something was stressing him too much. I had to reclaim the guy I knew.

We called it Mommy School. We did pages of math, watered the garden, and walked the dog. We did dishes, which he hated, and finished reading The Indian in the Cupboard. This was an unfortunate choice, with all the weapons in the story, but I was convinced Eliot had reached an age where he needed to distinguish between fantasy and reality. He needed to play out his toy weapon fantasies and move beyond them. He needed to know that in real life weapons were dangerous, and in most cases only made bad situations worse. He needed time to work through who he was on his own.

So it was that we had the following conversation after he had been playing with his nerf gun at the livingroom window:

“I went duck hunting for insects. I shot a fly. It was disgusting. I washed my hand in the bathroom.”

Then, “It was huge. Taller than you.”

And later, “I shot a bee.”

“No bees!” I said. “Bees are good!”

To which he said, “I apologized to the bee.”

When the target of his sponge bullets was Carly instead of an insect, I took his nerf gun away. He cried until his face had what Blue calls “mumps and measles.” He took his guitar and sat in his rocking chair facing the French doors to the back yard.

“Play a sad song,” Blue said, and Eliot started singing Freebird:

“If I leave here tomorrow…”

But Eliot didn’t actually play any chords, and as long as he couldn’t play a lick of music the electric guitar, like the gun, was fantasy. That was why we found him a guitar teacher. We owed it to our son to help him move into the real world, to the best of his abilities, even if we wouldn’t know for years to come what those abilities were. In the meantime he spent hours adjusting equipment and plugging his guitar into his amp. I figured if the musician thing didn’t work out, he could be a roadie.

The next year when Eliot returned to school he would be in junior high. This was strange since he still talked like a six year old, but something in him had shifted. He said he wanted to shave his head. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t back down. He laughed while the hair cutter shaved swaths of hair from his head, and he laughed all the way home. And actually, the crew cut looked good. It was a definite statement about who he had become. He was a preadolescent. Even if he still couldn’t read.