The Beginning of a Journey

I began my teaching career in the late 1980's and have spent my entire professional career in Indian Education. My idealism was high and the level of understanding of my students was low. Withing a couple of years, I was seeing something I could not explain. I had learned how to change behaviors by observing the modeling of my parents, my teachers, and my coursework in college. I thought deviant behaviors needed the same approach. I soon realized the behavior strategies I was using did not have the desired impact on the many of my students. I saw repeat behaviors, tantrums, impulsive actions, sexually deviant behaviors, and low academic abilities with the majority of the students in my classrooms. Not only my classroom struggled with this phenomenom, the entire school seemed to be struggling with the same issues. Students were provided the opportunity to learn, but many did not seem to retain what was learned. Impulsive language and physical behaviors were the norm, rather than the exception. My first year of teaching was in a classroom with no windows, twenty-four 6th graders, with little support for the 8 students who were diagnosed the following year with EBD (Emotional Behavior Disability). I was kicked, spit upon, assaulted, glasses broken, shirt torn, and thought my middle name was "F------g White Asshole." Most of my student came from single parent homes or lived with grandmothers or aunties. All were low income and most lived in tribal housing scattered over a large rural area. Few had structure in their lives. The school was the only place many student got a hot meal. But through it all, I saw the other side of each of these kids, the sometimes tender, sometimes desparate, sometimes remorseful side, and began to wonder what caused all the actions I witnessed.

One day, a nurse came to the school and provided an in-service to the teachers on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Fetal Alcohol Effects (now known as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)). Each slide of the presentation brought more focus to the cause of the behaviors I was experiencing. Pictures of FASD children mirrored the faces of several of the students I was teaching. Behaviors identified by the nurse matched the behaviors all our teachers were struggling with. That hour began my journey of studying the research of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and toward the goal of stopping this devastating totally preventable disability.

This revelation hit home regarding my students and I began to realize that someone very close to me was a victim of FASD and was displaying many of the same behaviors. His parents had taken him to psychologists and counselors who could not determine a reason for his behaviors, tantrums, and academic disability. The parents were hard drinking people of German descent. Any event in their home revolved around beer and wine. The more I researched the then limited understanding of FASD, the more I realized I was seeing something that almost nobody else was seeing, the epidemic of FASD, and it was hitting close to home. A new child was born into this family. As my wife and I looked at the picture of the infant, my heart dropped. This innocent baby, new to the world, had entered the world with two strikes against her. She had all the physical characteristics of a full Fetal Alcohol Syndrome child. Eventually, more than 7 children were born into this family with some observable level of FASD. The matriarch of this family told me her doctor has told her to drink to calm her nerves. No one knew, at that time, the ramifications of that action and this family lives with FASD on a daily basis. Fortunately for this family, there is a strong structure, the one component that gives FASD children the best chance for success.

I began to develop strategies to work with FASD students. I did not talk to many people about it, as very few people even wanted to talk about it. When I would try to explain, many people moved to the moral issue of drinking, rather than try to understand the ramifications of a mother drinking during a pregnancy. Then, a startling revelation came to light that gave strength to my arguments.

Our pastor and his wife could not have children. They had adopted three, a girl and two boys, before moving into our church. They were patient, kind, and attentive parents. Their children grew into insolent, disobedient, and deliquent adolescents with academic difficulties. This was a very humbling experience for these fine people. I was seeing the same behaviors with these three as I was witnessing in my classroom. In a conversation with the pastor, the subject of FASD came up. All three children came from mothers who drank during their pregnancy. All three were identified as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome children. All three had similar disabilities and behaviors. None of the public school teachers working with their children understood FASD. A pattern was beginning to form in my mind. We, as educators, physicians, social workers, psychologist, etc., are reactive to behaviors by the nature of our business and create a diagnosis with a prescription to cure the symptom, and as such, miss the root cause. The symptoms of FASD are a result of brain damage that happens before the child is born and is lifelong. I began to see I needed to re-visit my assumptions of teaching students. I needed to look at my classroom using the continuing growth of research of FASD. I needed to change the classroom environment, change my approach to teaching, and change how I worked with students in order to change their behaviors. I started to think about the ramification of not speaking out, of not bringing this message to the world, of not trying to stop the root cause. I began to see I needed to find out as much as I could about this mostly unknown, and mostly unbelieved epidemic. I committed myself to making a difference.