My son Maddox who graduated from Cheerful Helpers in 2023 recently celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week at Frostig West, his new school. He worked with his mom to make thank you cards, telling her what he wanted to say to each teacher. He signed them himself and after some encouragement, even handed them out at school. We were so proud and moved by his sincere participation.
After a very rough year for Maddox, which included this change of schools, he finally feels comfortable at Frostig. He has developed a healthy understanding of how he needs to act at school, what works and what does not. They are wonderful, supportive and loving to him at Frostig. But he has responsibilities. If he didn’t enter that environment ready to be a student, it just wouldn’t have worked.
His success there has added another layer of appreciation and gratitude for Maddox’s teachers at Cheerful Helpers and reminded me of how essential his time with them was. His main teacher, Rebeca (or as we call her in our house, “Saint Rebeca”) used to say that Cheerful Helpers was about helping kids learn to be students. It seems to me that some children can stumble their way through those first years of school and adjust when needed. But Cheerful Helpers' kids need the space and time to sort it out. In Maddox’s case he had lots of limits to test. So Rebeca was challenged by behavior that would have ended Maddox’s time at any other school. She was unflinching from the start and able to take anything he could throw at her, and he threw a lot of things at her.
Through it all she kept encouraging him, insisting he could be a school kid and do school kid things. At times it was hard for my wife and I to share Rebeca’s optimism. Would he really be able to do something like celebrating a classmate’s birthday (or his own) without chaos?
Of course, Rebeca was right. He could do it. He does do it. Everyday. Frostig West has a total enrollment of 22 kids, elementary through high school, but they seem to have about 4 to 5 birthdays every week. I might be exaggerating but not by much. And Maddox has made all of these birthdays work wonderfully.
The word “appreciation” does not feel adequate for the work Rebeca and Richard and Erin (and new teacher Ángel) do for the kids at Cheerful Helpers. Gratitude is closer. Awe is maybe even better. Either way, it’s hard to imagine as Maddox goes through his school career and many more teacher appreciation weeks that I won’t think back often to the teachers that first helped him become a school kid. They met him with open arms while he was struggling through his disability in a way that was too much for most people, but not them.
