It’s Wednesday, 8 a.m., breakfast time in the Toddler Room at Iola’s Head Start preschool.
Three adults and two towheaded toddlers sit in small chairs around a small table. The adults’ knees are all visible above the tabletop.
The children, Easton and Rey, ladle spoonfuls of Cream of Wheat and mandarin oranges into their mouths with half-accurate aim. Other toddlers will join these two soon. These are the early birds.
Rey, a sweet-faced girl of almost two, with plump cheeks, sleepy eyes, and the appetite of an NFL lineman, keeps her hungry spoon moving in one continuous loop, with great purpose from bowl to mouth to bowl to mouth until the bowl is empty. And then, in a quiet voice, she asks: “More?”
At certain crucial points during the toddler’s breakfast, 18-year-old Keisha Blazek reaches over and, without disrupting Rey’s pace, removes errant globs of porridge from the girl’s bangs or from inside the tiny shell of her ear.
Blazek, a senior at Iola High School, is in her second month as an intern at SEK-CAP Family Development’s Early Head Start program. The partnership is part of a career-readiness initiative spearheaded by USD 257.
Blazek and Rey sit until Rey has had her fill. In moments of vexation, and when she thinks no one is looking, the toddler will ditch the flatware and use her small hand to scoop up the Cream of Wheat. “Use your spoon, please,” Blazek tells Rey in the gentlest of voices.
It’s the policy of Head Start not to use negative phrasing when correcting a child’s behavior. Instead, program guidelines enlist a strategy called Positive Behavior Support (PBS) to encourage a child in the correct direction.
“Say, if a child came running through here,” explained Kristi Rodriguez, the kindly site manager of SEK-CAPs Iola office, “instead of saying ‘stop, no, and don’t,’ we tell them what we do want them to do. So instead of saying, ‘Stop running,’ we would say, ‘Use your walking feet.’ It takes that negative completely out of it. And when you’re dealing with families in poverty or in crisis, negative things are the last things those children need to hear.”
The thinking behind PBS is only one of the many practical revelations that Blazek has been able to amass in her short time as a Headstart intern. But theyve been lessons, says the teen, that could only have come from the real-world education that the internship has afforded her.
Its helping us build up to what we really want to do, and this, says Blazek, dragging a cloth across Reys mouth, is what I really want to do.
SPECIFICALLY, Blazek wants to own and operate a daycare someday, one that caters to children with special needs. Shes realistic she knows it will be difficult, exhausting, often thankless work. “But there are a lot of special-needs kids out there who need special one-on-one attention, kids who don’t work very well around other, more regular kids like him,” says Blazek pointing to the classrooms play area, where Easton is wearing a plastic construction helmet the wrong way round and bouncing up and down on a toy cow, shouting “Ride a bull! Ride a bull! Ride a bull! Ride a bull! Ride a bull!”
But Blazek has a track record of conquering difficult things. Two years ago, when she was 16, the Iola teen gave birth to a little girl, Zaylee. Blazek was scared at first. She wondered how she would finish high school with a baby to take care of, how she would raise a daughter while still a young person herself.
But the experience forced on Blazek a new maturity. If I didnt have Zaylee, reflects Blazek, I probably wouldnt be going down the path Im going down. I would probably still be the dumb kid I used to be. Before I had her, I was doing some things I shouldnt have been and hanging out with the wrong crowd. Not listening. Doing what I wanted. But after I got pregnant with her, everything changed. I realized that it was no longer about me.
