An update from Michael, a junior majoring in English and political science who participated in the Alternative Breaks trip to Youth in Need and Crisis Nursery in St. Louis, Missouri:
In March 2015, Alternative Breaks sent a group of six students and one advisor to St. Louis, Missouri, for the purpose of volunteering with Youth in Need, a nonprofit group providing pre-kindergarten schooling to low-income students, and Crisis Nursery, an organization offering temporary shelter and social services to abused children.
Over the course of our five days we divided our day between volunteering at the pre-kindergarten school in the morning and the nursery in the afternoon. While at Youth in Need each of us assisted teachers with their classes of three- to five-year-olds; at Crisis Nursery we had the opportunity to play and interact with children ranging from newborns to pre-teens. Through our experiences at both organizations we learned how difficult it can be to teach and care for children, and personally I also came to appreciate the challenges children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds face in their ability to succeed in school and life. As we helped with everything from instructing pre-kindergarten students on how to count to playing with toy cars with toddlers who came from abusive relationships, some of the issues that underprivileged children face became a reality with a face and a name to it.
Breaking up into groups at Youth in Need, we each worked in our assigned classrooms from Monday through Friday, so with this cross-section of experiences we were able to compare among ourselves what was typical behavior from the students and the teachers. Often students with the most behavioral issues, for example throwing toys and screaming at other children, had the greatest difficulty with comprehending their lessons, so we discovered that students who disrupt the classroom both pose and face greater academic problems than their more well-behaved classmates.
For young students, regardless of whether or not they disrupt the classroom, the process of becoming at home in a structured social learning environment is a key benefit of the early childhood education that Youth in Need (and Head Start more generally) provide. Different situations seemed to predictably elicit different responses from the children. At the water play area, one student would predictably have trouble sharing his toys and space with the other students, and another student seemed to have chronic difficulty with concentrating and participating during the group songs and dances.
Faced with students like the ones I just mentioned, we had to quickly adapt to our new surroundings and roles by telling the students what the limits of bad behavior were and by encouraging the students to act differently by engaging them through conversation and diverting their attention to situations and areas where they would be less prone to be disruptive. Even with classes having between fifteen and twenty-five students, we saw how difficult it can be to lead a classroom full of young, energetic, and often rambunctious students. With detailed and personalized knowledge, the teachers individualized their positive and negative reinforcements of the students’ behavior. While the necessary condition for being a good teacher seems to be the ability to care for others, the sufficient condition for being a good teacher seems to be the ability to understand others. The best teachers we observed at Youth in Need had a passion for both caring and understanding their students. By the end of our time at Youth in Need, I grew to greatly respect the work the pre-kindergarten teachers do.
As with the students at Youth in Need, the children — often abused —who come to Crisis Nursery are in great need of people who are both caring and understanding, and we witnessed the difficult situation faced by the staff members at Crisis Nursery who provide shelter services for three-hundred and sixty-five days a year and twenty-fours hours a day. At Crisis Nursery we visited and volunteered at several of their locations, so we were able to gain an appreciation of the scope of the organization’s wide reach and deep support within the greater St. Louis community.
As for the children, despite the difficult situations in which they found themselves, they were friendly and willing to interact with us; however, I also noted that they could be somewhat more reserved than the students we encountered at Youth in Need. Although it is difficult to establish a relationship between the children and the staff members at Crisis Nursery given the seventy-two hour maximum time limit for a stay at Crisis Nursery, I saw how the staff members tried to make each child feel safe and appreciated in the shelter. Given that Crisis Nursery provides short-term shelter, I wondered what happened to the children who were not able to find sanctuary at Crisis Nursery.
From volunteering with Youth in Need and Crisis Nursery not only did I become more aware of the needs of children in terms of education and protective services from abusive relationships, but I also became more knowledgeable about the difficulties of staffing and operating organizations that work with the issues of early childhood education and social services for abused children. Both Youth in Need and Crisis Nursery taught me that to provide educational and protective services to underprivileged children, the government and civil society need to partner with each other: Youth in Need works with Head Start, and Crisis Nursery is affiliated with many St. Louis-area public health systems.
Finally, I come away from this Alternative Breaks volunteer mission with a sense of respect for the children, teachers, and staff members with whom we worked, and I also leave the experience with a sense of urgency about the issues of limited access to high-quality early childhood education and limited availability of emergency shelter and social services for abused children.
