Skip to main content

Children's Memorial Grove

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit Children's Memorial Grove, which memorializes children killed by violence in Alameda County.

The memorial is at the end of a one-mile hike that overlooks a beautiful lake and is a lovely setting for a tribute to the children we have lost, but I just couldn't stop thinking, "We shouldn't need this."

 The memorial only went up until 2012, so I kept wondering if I'd know more of the names. The kids I taught would be at the most dangerous ages, statistically, in the last few years.

I felt panic every time I saw a first or last name I recognized, but the only child I knew personally was in 2009, and I've told his story before.

I'm sure I would know more from 2013-2016. And, of course, one of my former students was killed last year, but he was an adult. Barely.


 I don't know what we can do to make this obsolete. It's bad enough when kids die in any way, but to die violently? It SHOULDN'T HAPPEN. And yet it does. Frequently. And the families and kids left behind have to deal with the unimaginable.

No parent should have to go through this. No child should have to see their friend killed.

I don't know what we should do, but something. The answer is something.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Stuffed Animals

There are several much more serious stories I was going to share, but I'm not in the mood to be made sad tonight, so I'll tell you all about the stuffed animals.  This is a post that needs images so someday when I have or borrow a working scanner, I will add the photos. A few years into teaching, I joined Freecyle.  For those of you who don't know Freecycle, it's a group of people in any given community who are on an email list to get rid of their old stuff and get stuff from other people.  It's a fabulous form of recycling. Somebody posted that they had a huge bag of stuffed animals in good condition to give away and I decided to grab it for my class. I thought that some of the kids would like the stuffed animals, but I certainly didn't think they'd all be into them.  Kids grow up really fast in that neighborhood, and when you have six-year olds talking about how they walk to school alone because their parents say they're "grown," and how

A Loss

  (I have been putting off finishing this blog post for months. You'll see why)  Today, I was cleaning a bookshelf and I found the journal from one of my third-grade students, who I call Fred in my book , in 2001. I still had it because he didn't come to the last day of school to get his stuff this year and I guess it got put in a pile and somehow I've kept it with me.  He didn't come to the last day of school, probably because his family was a mess: dad in prison, mom in an abusive relationship, all the kids (understandably) acting out violently. Fred was expelled from our school in second grade for hitting a teacher. Then he was expelled from the other school, I don't know why, at the end of second grade. He came back on the condition from the administration that he be in my class because I had him as a student in first grade and he listened to me and worked well with me.  We had a really good relationship, although Fred was definitely not easy to have in class.

A New Prison, Part Two

  Second very long part of the prison visit report.   After we got all the paperwork filled out and went through the metal detector, we got visitation slips with the name of the inmate, and made our way over to the other building for visitation. This is not maximum security so thankfully you can just sit next to the inmates, and not be separated by glass or have to use a telephone to talk.    First, you get a gate unlocked and go into a holding pen that is of course in direct sunlight (or rain if it's that season) and surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. You wait there until the gate at the other end is unlocked. This holding pen was a little bigger and less claustrophobic than the other prison (I do not have any claustrophobia and I came very close to a panic attack once at the other place) and they opened the other gate more quickly. Then you walk, again in blazing sunlight (or rain) to the visitation building. This one was less of a walk than the other prison but I still