Beautiful Child: The story of a child trapped in silence and the teacher who refused to give up on her
A stunning and poignant account of an extraordinary teacher's determination never to abandon a child in need from the internationally bestselling author of ‘One Child’ and No. 1 bestseller ‘Ghost Girl’.Seven-year-old Venus Fox never spoke, never listened, never even acknowledged the presence of another human being in the room with her. Yet an accidental playground 'bump' would release a rage frightening to behold.The school year that followed would prove to be one of the most trying, perplexing, and ultimately rewarding of Torey's career, as she struggled to reach a silent child in obvious pain. It would be a strenuous journey beset by seemingly insurmountable obstacles and darkened by truly terrible revelations. Yet encouraged by sometimes small, sometimes dazzling breakthroughs, as a dedicated teacher, Torey remained committed to helping a 'hopeless' girl, and patiently and lovingly leading her toward the light of a new day.
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Torey Hayden
Beautiful Child
Contents
This book is based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names and some identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed. Some characters are not based on any one person but are composite characters.
The first time I saw her, she was atop a stone wall that ran along the west side of the playground. Lolling back with one leg outstretched, one drawn up, her dark hair tumbling opulently down behind her, she had her eyes closed, her face turned to the sun. The pose gave her the aura of some long-forgotten Hollywood glamour queen and that’s what caught my attention, because she could, in fact, have only been six or seven.
I went on past her and up the walk to the school. Seeing me coming, the principal, Bob Christianson, came out from the school office. “Hey, darned good!” he cried heartily and clapped me on the shoulder. “Great to see you. Just great. I’ve been so looking forward to this. We’re going to have good fun this year, hey? Great times!”
In the face of such enthusiasm I could only laugh. Bob and I had a long history together. When I was just a struggling beginner, Bob had given me one of my first jobs. In those days he was director of a program researching learning disabilities, and his noisy, casual, hippy-inspired approach to dealing with the deprived, difficult children in his care had alarmed many in our rather conservative community at the time. Admittedly, it had alarmed me a little in the beginning too, because I was newly out of teacher training and not too accustomed to thinking for myself. Bob had provided me with just the right amount of encouragement and direction while bullishly refusing to believe anything I claimed to have learned from my university course work. As a consequence, I spent a heady, rather wild couple of years learning to defend myself and finding my own style in the classroom along the way.
At the time it was an almost ideal working environment for me, and Bob almost single-handedly molded me into the kind of teacher I would become, but in the end he was too successful. I learned not only to question the precepts and practicalities of the theories I was taught in the university, but I also began to question Bob’s. There was too much insubstantial pop psychology in his approach to satisfy me; so when I felt I’d grown as much as I could in that setting, I moved on.
A lot of time had passed for both of us in the interim. I’d worked in other schools, other states, other countries, even. I’d branched out into clinical psychology and research, as well as special education. I’d even taken a couple of years away from education altogether. Bob, meantime, had stayed local and moved in and out of the private and public sectors, in and out of regular and special education. We’d stayed in touch in a rather casual way, although neither of us had kept close track of what the other was doing. As a consequence, it had been a delightful surprise to discover Bob was now the principal of the new school I was being sent to.
Our state school system was in the midst of one of its seemingly endless reorganizations. The previous year, I’d worked in an adjacent district as a learning support teacher. I was going from school to school to work with small groups of children and to provide backup support for teachers who had special education students integrated into their classrooms. Although this program had been in place only two years, the system decided it wasn’t working effectively enough with the bottom-end children. Consequently, a third of the learning support teachers were given permanent classrooms to allow children with more serious and disruptive behaviors to have longer periods of special education placement.
I jumped at the chance to give up the peripatetic lifestyle and have a classroom again, because I enjoyed that milieu enormously and felt it best suited my teaching style. Ending up in Bob’s school was a bonus.
“Wait till you see this room,” Bob was saying as we climbed the stairs. And stairs. And stairs. “It’s such a super room, Torey. From the time I knew you were coming, I wanted to give you someplace you could really work in. Special ed. so often gets the leftovers. But that’s the beauty of this big, old building.” We climbed yet another flight of stairs. “Plenty of room.”
