Educator tries to meet needs of at-risk children
This is the third in a series exploring the impact of addiction on Butler County families and the children entangled in its wake.
These stories are publishing in three installments. The first installment published in September and explored the scope of the community's addiction problems.
Sunday and Monday, the pieces peer deeply into the effects of growing up around substance abuse.
The third round of articles, planned for November, aims to provide a road map detailing available resources and stories of hope and will explore what directions Butler County should head next.
Principal Keenan McGaughey sees the red flags in his students easily enough, but learning exactly what's behind their behavior requires digging.Once he and his staff finally earn their students' trust and they start talking, the stories are occasionally distressing.“Some kids have told me, 'My mom chose drugs over me,'” McGaughey said. “'My mom dropped me off at my grandparents' house because she loved drugs more than she loved me.'”Just as there are indicators of drug use, those who work with at-risk children learn to recognize when one of them might be growing up with an addict or two in their house. Those children are often rougher around the edges than their classmates, and stories like the ones McGaughey hears can explain why.McGaughey is the principal of Center Avenue Community School in Butler. The school teaches students in kindergarten through sixth grade who have needs or behavioral issues that require being addressed outside of the Butler Area School District's other buildings.Students growing up around addiction tend to have behavioral problems, McGaughey explained, so he tends to see a lot of them in his halls.“I see the epidemic impacting more students in my building just because they're referred to me by virtue of the problems they're having,” McGaughey said. “They filter to us, and our goal is to be a safety net. We try to figure out what this child needs.”
What McGaughey and other educators are seeing in the classroom mirrors the growing body of research over the past two decades into the impact of chaotic home lives on children and its potential life-long affects.Known as Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines them as “potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood (0-17 years) such as experiencing violence, abuse or neglect; witnessing violence in the home; and having a family member attempt or die by suicide.”The CDC further said ACEs also include aspects of a child's environment that can undermine their sense of safety, stability and bonding. This can include growing up in a household with substance misuse, mental health problems or instability due to parental separation or incarceration of a parent, sibling or other member of the household.Adverse Childhood Experiences have been linked to risky health behaviors, chronic health conditions, low life potential and early death in adults.Once children growing up in homes riddled with ACEs arrive at schools' doorsteps, the commonalities accompanying them take on something of a domino effect.
“I don't care” is a familiar mantra. “It doesn't matter” is another. Even when emotional walls start to come down, McGaughey said, the stories might hide details behind vulgarities and derogatory language.Then, there's the anger.“One young man, his grandparents are raising him,” McGaughey said. “He is angry. He hates. He says, 'I hate my grandparents. They're so hard on me. Why weren't they hard on my mom? If they were hard on my mom like they are on me, my mom may not have gotten addicted to drugs.'”McGaughey calls it a doom-loop. Home life is full of despair, and it sucks the joy out of the rest of life too. Educators try their best to offer love and compassion, but by the time issues are presenting themselves at school, it can be hard to get through.“Anyone that tries to get close, they push away,” McGaughey said. “Why? Because your mother and father, the ones (who) are supposed to be the closest to you, the nurturers — they're not there for you.”National studies show students with three or more ACEs are 2.5 times more likely to fail a grade. More troubling to educators, students with three or more ACEs are significantly more likely to be unable to perform at grade level, be labeled as special education, suspended, expelled or drop out of school.And students not reading proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to fail to graduate from high school, according to national data gathered by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The Baltimore-based foundation provides grants aimed at helping federal agencies, states, counties, cities and neighborhoods create more innovative, cost-effective responses to issues negatively affecting children, including communities in Pennsylvania.
In family court, Butler County Judge Kelley Streib sees similar characteristics to those educators see in their classrooms and schools.“It's behavioral issues across the board, at school and at home,” Streib said.Streib is required by law to regularly see children in court in the cases she oversees. She thought the rule was odd at first, but now she couldn't see it any other way.“They're either very talkative or not at all,” Streib said. “Sometimes, I think that depends, in my opinion, on what their normal is. To some of these kids, chaos is normal to them. They function well in chaos, but when you try to bring them into a more ordered environment, they have more challenges. They're used to chaos.”She sees generational poverty as being the biggest issue for children of addicts in Butler.Wealthier families use drugs, Streib said, but they have access to resources to keep their families stable, despite their addictions.It's that lack of stability in poorer households that multiplies addiction's harm.“I think it's the chaos that I see that children are most harmed by, whether that chaos is whatever happened in a home where the parents are drug addicted or if the chaos is being bounced around by family members and never knowing exactly when mom or dad might be around,” she said.
Ken Clowes, a recovering addict who now works with Butler's Hope is Dope group to help others beat addiction, believes many addicts develop their issues because of troubled childhoods. For many, he estimates, the void came from their parents' own addictions.“What I hear from the majority of people in recovery who tell their stories, there seems to be one common theme,” Clowes said. “And that's: I felt different as a kid. I felt that I didn't fit in with everyone else.”Clowes felt the same. He describes feeling a void in himself for much of his young life, and not knowing how to fill it, except with drugs.In his work today, he hears other addicts talk about similar feelings. He thinks family dynamics must explain the commonalities.“It can't be from anything other than feeling a lack of connection with your parents,” Clowes said. “If a child lacks that connection or feeling at a young age, they're going to be more timid. They're going to be less likely to go explore the world.”
