One Step Forward, Three Steps Back

It seems to me that life goes in cycles. You have the cycles of the seasons, the cycles of the school year, and the cycles of life and death which are occurring world wide daily. My faith, for sure, goes in cycles - cycles of getting close to God and feeling as though there is nothing that can separate me from His love to cycles of feeling further and further away because I am so grounded in this world and in worldly matters. My youth at work seem to go through cycles as well. They are currently in one of two different cycles. Half of my youth have passed their FCAT (Florida's standardized test), they have been keeping up with their school work all year long and are sitting back and enjoying the fact that the teachers are easing off of them towards the end of the school year. The other half of my youth are freaking out. They have been relaxing most of the year, their grades have dropped drastically, and they are trying to frantically get their work done, do their makeup work, and redo some of their work because of their failing grades - all while the idea of 'repeating this grade' is breathing heavily down their necks.

We have eased off some of our kids during this time - letting them do Sudoku puzzles to work on logic instead of drilling them on their multiplication and division tables. However, we have really done this so that we can focus our whole attention on these kids who are frantically trying not repeat their grade level. I have one girl, a middle school girl, who is actually in the 5th grade. Her younger sister is in a grade higher than her because she failed and her sister didn't. A woman I work with fully sponsored this young girl to go to a Christian school down the street from Branches because there, 5th grade is considered "middle school." Therefore, because of my coworker, she can come to all youth events for Branches and not be considered in a lower grade than her younger sister. The problem is, the scholarship money never came through for this young girl to go to school, so the payments that my coworker was making was not fully footing the bill of her education. The school tried and tried to contact this girl's parents, however, they never called the school back. Rather than kicking her out of school, they let her continue, except the teacher stopped grading her work (which are individualized books that they have to complete a certain number of in order to pass that grade level.) The teacher never told this girl what was going on, so she spent the majority of the school year not doing any work because the teacher would not issue her new books or let her continue with her work. Finally, my coworker called the school and heard the entire problem. (She was obviously pretty upset.) She is now covering the entire bill of my youth's schooling so that she can finish out the year. We placed this young girl in that school because it was going to allow her to catch up in her school work and hopefully fill the gaps in her education and allow her to move on into middle school. However, now she is about a semester's worth of work behind and if she even wants to pass the 5th grade (again) she has to basically work night and day on her school work.

This is unfortunately an issue for a lot of our youth. In the case of this young girl, it wasn't entirely her fault. However, some of our youth are just too lazy to take responsibility for their actions and do their own work. In Florida, public school do not get out until the middle of June. These kids literally have a little less than three weeks to finish a semester's worth of work. It's so hard to see this issue and wonder if there was something you could have done to change this outcome. I cannot physically make the students do their homework or study. But, at the same time, it's so tough to see these kids fail when you have been helping them all year long.