It's all too close

I am uneasy being in this room with the chipper voices of my executioners, blithely announcing that we have been forsaken.

The woman on the phone--a commissioner or deputy commissioner or HR person or I don't even know--says that, even if the money is found in the budget, "that bell can't be unrung."

It started yesterday with some cryptic email about a mandatory meeting. I didn't see why the state couldn't give me the topic sentence. When I approached the director, he admitted that he didn't know any more than I did, but I thought that I saw a small smile in his eyes.

The state is shutting down my facility and three others to help balance Cuomo's budget shortfall due to COVID.

One of my coworkers, a YDA whom I refer to as a teddy bear, eats his lunch next to me. It is a full takeout meal, including an entree, a pint of chili, and a breadstick. He chews a few bites of the breadstick contemplatively, puts it down, listens for a moment, and resumes chewing. It is unclear that he is paying attention to anything beyond that breadstick until he asks the voices about a detail of finding us all new jobs. He is not satisfied with their incomplete answer, their "Well, we'll get back to you on that," and resumes eating. One would imagine that the voices had prepared for this question. Their hedging can be taken as all but confirmation of the likely worst.

Other coworkers stare forward, quietly scoffing or clenching and unclenching their hands as these women go down a checklist of what they must say before allowing us to ask more questions. I fall mostly into staring, mostly at nothing but sometimes at the small details of the body language around me. How many of us want to scream at these harbingers for bearing ill-tidings with grins in their voices? Not that it would do any good to scream, but only to release the pressure built in our chests.

We don't scream or even much raise our voices, even though they are worse than useless to us now that they have dropped the ax. Had they come down from Albany, they could have brought paperwork to expedite our transition. Earlier in the day, a guard called them cowards for making us gather in the library when they wouldn't deign to look us in the eyes.

We are too civilized or too immediately beaten down by our suddenly uncertain futures to take it out on them.

A coworker leaves and reenters the room a few times as though she wants the voices on the phone to see her storm out. I can't fault her reaction. This process suggests that we matter so little that they see no reason that our closure can't be accomplished over a short conference call before they go to lunch. This isn't even the most important event on their calendars today.

The voices kept reiterating that my facility had done nothing wrong. I found this grating as, of course, we had done nothing wrong. That was not in any question except the one they persisted in raising to console us. This is only about Cuomo and his bureaucracy, not our personal or professional failings. We did all the therapeutic programs they laid upon us, something no one else in the system did--possibly because they didn't have the population who might respond. We have the vulnerable ones, the middle schoolers, the mentally and physically handicapped, the LGBTQIA. We work with the kids that no one else can or will.

The women on the phone do not spend time in facilities. They have never met my students or the students at the other facilities. They have no holistic comprehension of what's going on.

They give lip service that this isn't layoff and that they will try to get us jobs at other state agencies, though some of my coworkers will suffer "significant pay cuts." If they find me a job, I shouldn't suffer that, but that if is large. In the best of circumstances, schools do not want English teachers. During widespread layoffs nationwide, during a hiring freeze in all state agencies, this is not improved. There are three other facilities of teachers that will all be going after the same jobs--though two are farther away and one was for adjudicated girls.

This mass closure doesn't make sense because it doesn't have to make sense. It just must be the right number on an Excel sheet on some bureaucrat's computer.

I've dealt with this sort of "cutting one's own throat" when I worked for an educational publisher. For every error, that company would pay a million-dollar fine. My salary was a paltry $35,000 a year, and I caught several things that ought to have incurred huge penalties. But, on one column, they saved $70,000 by axing all the proofreaders. Hiring temps without benefits and paying out many millions of dollars when they missed errors didn't matter because they could say that they saved money not having professional proofreaders. It was a net loss of tens of millions of dollars, and the company shut down but look how much they saved!

The closest facility that isn't closing in 23 minutes away, but it is also the state's highest security. My kids at present have usually committed low-level offenses, like getting in a fight, threatening their families, or being caught with drugs (some commit more severe crimes, but those are rarer), those who AWOLed from private placements, and those from the above-mentioned vulnerable populations. At the high-security facility, it is murderers who will never be released. They will go from the juvenile facility to adult corrections to finish out their sometimes life sentences. As I do the ones that I have now, I cannot tell those residents that I have the same hope that they can have a normal life after their six-month stay with me. The only way the high-security residents leave is shackled in the back of a prison van.

This will be where the state will put my trans girl who was placed with us because she was sex trafficked. This is where they will put the kid with fetal alcohol syndrome and an IQ of 70. My middle school student who cannot control his bladder and bowels because he was raped so often (and who was with us because he fought off a rape attempt) will be in a room beside a young man who killed people after sexually assaulting them. All residents deserve services, even the murderous gang member, but I cannot see how this is anything other than an unmitigated disaster in the making.

I can blame this on COVID, but it is more about the indifference of people in Albany to the realities of adjudicated youth and those who work with them. They could have kept us open to deal with the nonsecure residents. It would have cost them proportionally little. COVID was the stated factor, but I remember too well Cuomo hiring secretaries and deputies who openly admitted wanting to torch state facilities to help the for-profit private placements.

I am genuinely sad, too, because I have liked working here. I am great at my job where most people would not be. I am given independence and earn stellar evaluations because I get my kids interested in learning, sometimes for the first time in their lives. I get them to trust that an adult cares about them and genuinely wants them to succeed. I relished working five miles from where I live. I respect my coworkers and my supervisor. I felt supported. The reputation of other facilities is not kind. They house the kids, not educate them. These teachers do not see the kids for weeks or months because of trouble on the living units. I do not want to print out packets that will be shredded and thrown in the trash. I can't stand being shunted to a hopeless place.

I worked for years to get my own classroom. I had to wait for another teacher to retire, then take her item number and stake my claim to classroom three, which I've had for years. I have earned for years was yanked away with a careless jot.

I taught eleventh grade for the first time this year to a kid who wanted to learn it. I have a middle school group that is learning about James Baldwin and social justice. I am helping to teach an illiterate kid to recognized sight words. I was making so much progress professionally.

Closing these facilities can't be worth more than a rounding error, but that isn't the point. Cuomo gets to talk about how he is taking serious steps to balance the budget--one that might be balanced simply by getting a grant from the federal government--while he avoids taxing his donors a penny. It is all sleight of hand, but it will play to the press. It will earn applause from the public until the moment they say, "Wait, you are sending these kids back to us? Like, the kids who tore up our streets, mugged people, and were arrested? You are putting them in private placements as close as you can to where they live? The ones from which they AWOL just all the time? And the statistics say that it increases crime and recidivism?"

My kids who make slow but steady progress with our medical, educational, and therapeutic interventions will lose them all. Children I could have helped will only reach my care once they have murdered someone during a mental health crisis.

In essence, I have lost the job I have held for over nine years, even though its exact date of ending is uncertain. A job that allowed me to move in with the woman who became my wife. A job that allowed me to get ahold of my mental health. A job that allowed me a life I like in a town I love. I don't envision letting go of this grudge.

At the latest, my facility will close by October 1. The budget goes through April 1, at which point they will give us a definite date. I don't know how much warning I will have at that point. Any is too little, particularly as the HR woman seemed confused by our reassignment questions as they apply to teachers. She did not seem to have considered that teachers and clinicians might not be able to slot in somewhere else. Facilities need many guards, but only one or two English teachers.

I don't want to move. Amber just painted the bathroom. I don't know how many non-negotiables I am allowed, but keeping my home is one of them. I want to stay a teacher, but I don't know how likely this is. At first, they will try to find me a job in this department, but if it goes too long, they could end up offering me a job doing most anything that is with the state. My skills are not easily transferable. If I get another job, I will possibly be able to keep my salary. Not taking a "significant" pay cut is another non-negotiable. Not commuting hours every day is on the list as well.

My union is toothless and won't fight for this much. They will back down at the smallest growl from Albany. They have yet to say a word about hundreds of their members losing their facilities as proof of this. They are keen to take our dues from our paychecks, many thousands of dollars a year, but they hadn't managed to negotiate our annual raise for four years.

One of the clinicians says the high-security facility twenty minutes away isn't that bad. However, I have had negative experiences with a few people from there, and no one praises the administration. During the call, the voices talked about how this high-security facility is the "flagship" of OCFS, the one they bring visitors around. (This is the same things they have said about my facility.) The clinician said, "That is because they bribe auditors with gift bags and fancy lunches, along with creating fraudulent documents."

I had always found the secure facilities to be soul-draining. They are surrounded by two fences topped with barbed wire. The guards can and do give kids full body cavity checks. The students are usually not invested in school (though some, knowing that there is no longer going to be a life for them outside of the carceral system, take this seriously enough to earn college credits). I doubt that they would allow me my tiny flash drive, on which I keep my lesson plans. I doubt, in fact, that I would be allowed my lesson plans, as what is the point of them without students in my classroom? At present, if I wish to, I can take my keys and be outside in a matter of forty-five seconds. I have to walk through a metal detector and have guards to a perfunctory look at my clear bag when I enter in the morning, but it isn't much of an issue. Any other screening is just for COVID. In the secure facilities, there are no keys. Too dangerous. Instead, one must buzz a door and wait for someone to see you on the camera and click it open.

After the meeting, one of my coworkers asks if I want to read the ridiculous email chain with one of her friends about this closure. I assure her that I only want to eat my lunch and distract myself.

She leaves me alone to sulk.

I sit in my room, unable to do much. The kids watch the inauguration--I had suggested it a week ago--and so I miss my first afternoon period. With the second, I do some work and am cheerful, then they learn about the Wim Hof method during their free time. Listening to this strange, sometimes foul-mouthed man talk about how all we need is breath control to solve problems from thermal to mental, I realize how committed some are to a foreign worldview, but I slow my breathing anyway. It couldn't hurt.

The facility director comes in after classes and asks how I knew. I tell him that it is only because I am paranoid; I have years of practice at catastrophizing.

He thought that it would be different, that the state would have seen how much we have been helping our children, how effective we are as a facility, and would have opened another wing, maybe of girls. This news has taken a lot out of him. Though he tried to keep composed and professional, this was the opposite of what he assumed going in.

He looked up the budgetary figures, finding that the governor will save $14 million in closing these facilities. When it is a budget of tens of billions, when the shortfall is fifteen billion (that the state might still get from the federal government), this is so paltry an amount that it is irrelevant. The Cuomo administration will throw into havoc the lives of hundreds for a change Cuomo won't even notice except that he will get to say he did it.

The director says with genuine feeling that he hopes that I will still do what is best for my kids every day. Of course, I will. I'm a professional. But that doesn't mean that this feels any better. I'm still being thrown under the bus.

My father tells me that years ago, Cuomo went on a rampage of closing prisons--not that he had any idea why he was doing it or what would replace them. He closed prisons that had been newly built and kept open ones that were physically falling apart; he had done no research, just said a certain number of prisons would close. Cuomo's budget states that they won't tax the rich if they get federal aid, but they aren't going to save our jobs. We are not his base.

The bureaucrats have no idea what the long-term effects of this will be. Even when a kid was frustrating, we did everything we could to make sure that they had the best experience. We understood these kids were losing some of their childhoods to us. I never felt as though they were irredeemable. We were the stopgap that kept them away from losing the rest of their freedom.

One of my coworkers says that she is reading a book titled You Are a Badass. She says this loss means that I have to say that I am a great author. Not that I will become a great author, but that I already am one. She thinks that this will be the impetus to rocket me to the next level of success. I appreciate her optimism.

I find it almost ironic that tomorrow I will get my COVID shot because I both work for a juvenile detention facility and am a teacher, knowing that both may be true only a little longer.

I will have to spend months, maybe as many as nine, trying to pretend that any of this is normal. They want me to continue teaching as usual, which I will, and pretend that I'm not seeing my world eroded from under me. Albany will, at some point, stop sending us children. At that point, I will come in and maybe do clerical tasks. Though I am a teacher, they will no longer have teaching for me to do.

The next morning, there are few things that I want less than to go to work. It feels like slacking even a little proves some point, though I cannot state for sure what that point might be. I cannot manage to listen to my usual podcasts about murder, minutiae, and monsters in the car. Instead, I sing along to Ingrid Michaelson and Bastille while weeping. I did not intend to cry, but it seems to be a thing my eyes do now.

My supervisor arrives before I do and, across the courtyard, we shrug in a way akin to "Well, what the hell can you do?" He thinks that he was given a migraine yesterday because he knew on some level that this was coming, and he did not want to face that meeting in person.

He will do what he can to help me be untouchable within the state and give them the least amount of grip on me to make my life difficult. We need to take care of one another because the system we have given a decade of our lives won't save us.

He figures that they will keep us until the end of the school year in June. There will be no summer school. We have four students who come down and one who is still in quarantine. We were supposed to get another. It is odd to rule us useless and then keep sending us residents. Either they see so little value in what we do that they stop giving us students, or acknowledge (as they do on the website for this facility) that in "addition to a focus on trauma-informed care, [we are] also known throughout the state for its ability to work effectively with gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth." The state shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways but eliminating us is a matter of cold logic from someone who does not care about the residents' rehabilitation and success.

Because of the stress and uneasy sleep, my memory is shot. I don't want to talk because I am not sure what thoughts I have already conveyed aloud. I can remember facts and anything I have memorized, I certainly do not lack the ability to write and teach, but anything short-term doesn't imprint itself on me. I am too busy in my own head.

There is an odd buzz in the air among my coworkers, some obviously lost, some brightly indifferent. The higher the pay grade and educational investment, the greater the despondency. A guard can go work as a bouncer, but a teacher has more limited options.

My mother thinks I should go back to college and become a special education teacher while interviewing for other positions. This has been her advice since I graduated with my master's degree. I told her that now was not the time for this conversation, that I needed a job to support my household, not a course load.

My father believes that maybe this is political blustering, that Cuomo might change his tune once Biden ponies up some of the requested federal aid and will suddenly start caring about my students. My father retired with the state, so he speaks from experience. I can't let myself have hope that the execution will be stayed.

last watched: Captain America: The First Avenger
reading: Lolita: The Annotated Edition