My inbox dinged with a new referral. It was for a sixth-grade girl who wasn’t coming to school. And when she did come to school she would end up in the counselor’s office refusing to go back to class. The tipping point for the referral was that the student escalated to yelling in the counselor's face and pushing her.
I interviewed the student’s teachers, the school counselor, and her mother. They were all convinced that she was bipolar and were hopeful that a diagnosis would magically make everything better. I shared with them that getting a bipolar diagnosis at age 12 was unlikely, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have options to improve the situation.
We’ll call my friend, Alice. The first time I met Alice, her eyes were peaking over her mask (this was late fall of 2020) and her natural bouncy curls were spilling out of her scrunchie. She squinted a bit with one eye, while raising the eyebrow above her other eye the way sassy teenagers do when they are around annoying adults who don’t know anything. I don’t remember how I explained to her why I was there. Up until this point she only had academic IEP goals and behavior was never a concern. I started with some low vulnerability and strength based interview questions and then dug a little deeper to see if she had any insight into why she wasn’t coming to school or why her emotions were escalating at school.
One of the many things that came out was: it was her perception that the counselor, who was supposed to be “her person,” was calling her mom and telling her “stuff” and she felt betrayed by the one person she felt connected with at school. Like many teenage girls, her peer relationships were rocky at best, explosive mostly and usually as a result of a social media “mishap” the night before that would spill into school the next day. All of this was a reasonable explanation as to why Alice avoided coming to school.
The tricky part about school avoidance is it’s really hard to compete with the reinforcers available at home: no math, writing, or academic expectations of any kind, access to TV, the internet and her phone, no adults asking her to be quiet, no peers giving her dirty looks or whispering to a friend while gazing in her direction, unlimited snacks, and no getting up early out of her warm, comfy bed. I had my work cut out for me.
In the interview with Alice, I found out that she loved animals. She didn’t have any pets at home, but she really wanted a bunny. During one of my observations, she selected a coloring sheet for her break activity and she picked one covered in ocean creatures because she loved fish, too. I wondered if having a class pet, something that needed her to take care of it, something that she could nurture and would highlight her strengths would help not only encourage her to come to school, but would also help rewrite the narrative for the adults that had most recently seen her at her worst. I thought about the animals she told me she liked and wanted for pets and then thought about which of these animals I would be willing to take home with me over summer break. I was prepared to take home a bunny (my kids could enter it as a 4H project), but I decided to lower the stakes and start with a fish as my opening offer knowing I would be willing to negotiate up to a rabbit.
After getting the ok from the special education teacher and building administrator, I asked Alice what she thought about having a fish at school to take care of. Her eyes lit up above the mask and her whole body woke up with excitement at the idea. “What do you think? A goldfish? A beta? What kind of fish?” She said she wanted a blue beta fish. I told her that part of the deal was that she needed to be at school because the fish was depending on her to feed it and keep the tank clean. She nodded in agreement and the deal was made.
The next day I arrived carrying a box with a small tank inside, water was splashing over the edges and dripping out of the bottom of the cardboard box down the front of my shirt as I trodded through the hallways. We set it up in the special education classroom and I gave her instructions on how and how often to clean the tank, how much food to feed each day, and the parts of the tank (aerator, heater, light, etc). She named the fish Alaska and then when I came back a week later, Alice had changed his name to Guppie.
Alice was meticulous about keeping Guppie’s tank clean. If she knew she was going to be gone a day due to a doctor’s appointment, she communicated with another teacher to ask if she would feed Guppie for her in her absence. She was serious about honoring her commitment. Not only did Guppie serve as motivation for Alice to come to school, but it also provided her with a way to cope with stress. Watching her fish swim around the tank calmed her anxiety. And now that she was more consistently coming to school, we had an opportunity to provide instruction.
I’d love to tell you that because of the “fish intervention,” Alice never missed a day of school, she learned how to appropriately regulate her emotions and was able to sustain an entire school day in her general education classes. Well, she did make marked gains before the year came to a close; however, the end of the school year brought challenges of its own as we worried about how the summer would go at home and what the next school year would bring. Alice would be transitioning to a brand new junior high building in the fall. And I had to keep Guppie alive for three months over the summer!
Stay tuned for Part 2 of The Fish Intervention: It Wasn’t Really About the Fish…..
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