Bird Dierking
Transcript
Emma Bussard: [00:00] All right, so today is Saturday, May 10th. And we're at Yancey Community...
Jeida Brooks: Yancey School Community Center. Thank you. And this is Jeida Brooks.
Emma Bussard: Emma Bussard.
Bird Dierking: Bird Dierking.
Jeida Brooks: Cool. So, since you have a special story, would you like to just go ahead and start?
Bird Dierking: [00:29] Okay. I am a resident of Esmont. I've lived here for 25 years now. I came to Virginia to attend the University of Virginia. I was getting my master's in special education. I ended up staying in Charlottesville after I attended UVA, which I hadn't originally planned on. But therefore, I ended up working in the Albemarle County School System, ultimately here at Yancey Elementary. I worked at Yancey for four years while living in Charlottesville, and then after that bought a home here in Esmont, half a mile away from Yancey.
[01:07] And I remember as I was preparing for that purchase that my colleagues told me that they thought I was a little bit crazy, that there would be kids showing up at my door all the time, and was I sure I didn't want to have a little more distance between me and school, but my response was, no, these people are my community.
[01:29] This is where I, these are the people I want to be, I want to run into these kids at the store. You know, this is who I want to see when I'm out and about. And so I bought my little place, walked and rode my bike to school for many years until Albemarle County Schools started school earlier. I am a night owl, so at that point I could no longer walk. So I worked here for 19 years until the school was preparing to close. Two years before that happened, I was transferred to another school, as were half of the staff members, as per a plan of assistance for the school.
[02:10] But as the special ed teacher, and the only special ed teacher, because the school was so small, that meant that any child with any disability would be on my caseload. Larger schools might have more than one special ed teacher and they would specialize.But any kids who came through the door were mine. And with special education, those kids remain on your caseload for all the years that they're eligible.So, whereas, you know, a child might have Mrs. Johnson for second grade and then go to Mrs.Harris for third grade, they were mine from kindergarten through fifth grade if they qualified for my services.
[02:53] That meant that I really, really got to know my kids and my families extremely well. Special ed involves a lot of communication with families, a lot of planning together. Every child has an individualized education plan and parents have to be a really involved part of that. This community had a lot of struggles. The family struggled socioeconomically and with having work and things that might make it hard for them to come to meetings.
[03:29] And so I would gladly go to their houses. I would go to their homes with papers that needed to be signed.I tutored children at home. I got invited to birthday parties and other family things, Memorial Day cookouts, because I was with these families for years. And it was such a wonderful part of my job to build those relationships. And I think living here in the community really made that possible.
[04:01] You know, I certainly could have done those things if I had still lived in Charlottesville. But I think it was much more likely to happen because I lived here in the community. And I continue to run into my families, my kids who have kids. It's always amazing to see them. The boys are all so tall and their voices are deep. And I have to ask them to remind me who they are because they look so different.
[04:27] When, you know, when the kids left here, in my mind, they're 10 years old and fifth graders for the rest of their lives. It's just, that's the picture I have in my mind. I have parents who have told me all these years later, Demetrius says you're still his favorite teacher, Ms. Bird. And I just, I love it. I can't get enough of it.
[04:50] I have a partner who lives out of town when he comes to visit and we're out and about. He always laughs about, he knows we're going to run into somebody that I know somewhere. No matter where we are, no matter what we're doing, chances are very great that we're going to run into somebody who's hollering out, hey, Ms. Bird. Or we'll be driving down the road and we're getting waves.
[05:17] My car has always been very obviously mine. I've always painted my cars. And so I have people waving at me all the time and I don't always know who they are because it happens fast. But they see my car and they know who I am.
[05:33] And so it's just been so wonderful, even though this school is closed and the kids are moved on to still be part of this community and still see these people. It's just wonderful.
05:51 --> 05:52
Jeida Brooks: [05:51] That's awesome. Can you like run through what a typical day would be like when you taught here?
Bird Dierking: A typical day? Typical days were even sometimes pretty atypical. Get here in the morning, kind of get ready for the day myself. But would always be out front when the buses arrived. Greeting kids as they came in. Setting the tone for the kids in the morning when they arrived. Really crucial.
[06:23] In our community, our families and our kids had to worry about things like, you know, do I have clean clothes to wear to school today? If my shoes are totally muddy, I might not be able to come to school today because it's the only pair I have. So things that kids shouldn't have to worry about that I wish our families hadn't had to worry about really impacted our kids. And so setting the tone for them was good. Liberal. Liberal with hugs. Greetings. Smiles. And a listening ear. And then in my job, I serve students either individually or in small groups, so I could have anywhere from one to maybe five kids at a time, anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes doing lessons in reading, math, writing, whatever areas they demonstrated a significant weakness in that would have them have qualified for those services. The intention was for what I worked on to be above and beyond what happened in their classrooms. So if they were not in class, if they weren't being successful with multiplication, then my job was to find other ways to approach multiplication, find out what, you know, what, what was going to work for each kid as far as how they approached learning. So although I had their individual plans, and although I had lesson plans for the day, my job was very much about being adaptable. Flexibility was my middle name. I could have the most beautiful lesson planned and have a kid come in and it just wasn't working. And you know, I just say, okay, well, let's, hmm, let's try this. And it might work great. I might say, what's not working for you? And maybe the kid would come up with a whole new idea.
[08:19] So I really appreciated the idea of the small groups. It worked great for the kids. It let me get to know them very well. Yeah, the days, the days went pretty quickly for me. I had sometimes up to, gosh, my day might have 12 small groups in a day, just coming and going, coming and going. Sometimes I'd sneak out and get a little recess duty. I really enjoyed having lunch with the kids. It's really funny to sit with kids who were just socializing. The things they talk about, sometimes just hilarious. It's fun to be a fly on the wall. But kids really enjoyed having somebody sit with them during a social time that, you know, didn't have to focus on lessons.
Jeida Brooks: [09:10] What kind of stuff did they talk about at lunch?
Bird Dierking: Oh, gosh. They would talk about, oh, I don't even know if I'm going to be able to come up with an example. What, you know, what they did after school, what, oh, gosh. I don't even think I can think of something. Just silliness. Giving each other a little bit of crap over, you know, who their favorite teams were or, I don't remember. Just kids stuff. Just being kids. Just being unfiltered was the fun part of it.
Jeida Brooks: [09:56] Yeah. Were you ever involved in, like, the clubs here as well?
Bird Dierking: Not as much. I was always here later in the day after school. I always had stuff to do. And so Club Yancey was a really important part of the day here. It was a bigger, grander, extended after school program. So most schools had after school and the kids would do homework and have, you know, some free time activities and they'd be in a classroom until parents came. Because our families struggled so much, we qualified for grants. I think there was a 21st century grant. It was connected in some way to 4-H.
[10:37] The Klugeys were Charlottesville community members who had great wealth and shared. So we had a program after school called Club Yancey that had, like, multi-hundred-thousand-dollar grants at their disposal. And the community, or the director of that program was just phenomenal. But it meant that, number one, a majority of our kids attended. So it wasn't just kids who had parents that couldn't pick them up early. A majority of our kids attended because there was no cost or low cost, very low cost.
[11:17] And we had community members or teachers could do classes in any skill, anything you could think of. We had kids learning to crochet, to do yoga, origami, anything any community adult could think of to teach the kids. We had classes like that. There was a requirement that there was a health and healthy eating feature. Did a lot of trips.There was a ski club. So clubs like that.
[11:53] There was a gentleman's club with dear Lucian Jackson, just the most incredible community member. He came dressed to the nines every time he was here. And he taught these young boys about manners and how you treat ladies. And they would buy them shirts and ties, and they would go out and have a fancy meal. So the offerings that these kids had were just far and away more than other kids at other schools were having. Help with homework instead of just do your homework. So I wasn't always involved in those things directly. But being at school, I was observing those things happening.
[12:39] And so could talk to the kids about those and just take incredible joy and pride in what we were doing for the kids.They were experiences that these kids would not have had otherwise. And in that vein, I always had lots of plants and animals at school. Just things the kids wouldn't have seen. You know, geckos and fish tanks and rabbits and birds, you name it. I had it.
[13:04] And that was good for kids who were having maybe behavior problems that we could have a behavior contract where you get to be, you're the fish feeder. So that means you've got to be here in the morning. You have to come to school and going to show me that that work is done.And then you're going to be the fish monitor. And so just providing our kids with opportunities that they typically wouldn't have had was something I really, really loved about Yancey.
Jeida Brooks: [13:32] That's awesome. And I know schools have changed so much, at least since I was in school as well.
Bird Dierking: Yeah.
Jeida Brooks: Have you noticed a huge shift in special education in particular and like that close-knit bonding that you had here?
Bird Dierking: [13:46] You know, yeah, yes and no.So way back when I first started teaching, the SOL tests, the state-mandated end-of-year tests were not, didn't exist yet. And so I definitely know that we felt when those did come along, we felt a loss of things like field trips and like art project kinds of things that were happening in class, had to start taking a back seat to preparing for those tests.
[14:19] Once we got more used to them, it was easier, you know, to plan our days. So, yeah, that a bit.
[14:44] What are the changes I see from then to now?
Jeida Brooks: Yeah.
Bird Dierking: I was going to say that finances have made a difference. So as schools have increased need and not received increased funding, special ed groups have grown. You know, instead of three special ed teachers in some of these larger schools, maybe now there's only two, which means instead of three kids in a group, you might have six kids in a group. And it still sounds like a small number compared to a full classroom.
[15:16] But when these are kids with learning disabilities and behavior issues and ADHD issues, so it's hard to concentrate anyway, that had a really big impact on them to be one of six. And, you know, these six kids could have five different ways of learning best. And so instead of individualizing my attention three different ways, now I might be doing it five or six different ways.
[15:43] So that definitely impacted the students. I find that this might not necessarily be a change over time, but I found that special ed teachers, because we have small groups, didn't have a full-size classroom. I, for a little while here, actually did. And it was wonderful to be able to have a whole section with a sofa and cushions and a section with computers and, you know, to have that space for us to do the things that we were doing.
[16:14] But very typically special educators have a small space. They have, you know, little offices or kind of windowless cubbies. Or if they do have a full-size space, they're sharing it with the speech pathologist and the occupational therapist. And that was always a struggle for me because, again, these are the kids who have the hardest time concentrating and learning and paying attention. And having three special ed groups of kids in one space was just incredibly challenging.
[16:45] And always, to me, felt so unfair to those kids. The kids who needed their private quiet time the most didn't receive it. And so I think as schools become overcrowded, as the county is, you know, can't just start building new schools every couple of years because, you know, we're a little tight. Yeah, those bigger classrooms go to a full-size grade-level class and then special ed gets sent into the smaller little half of an office somewhere. So in those ways, I felt the difference. I don't know if the kids knew that that was changing, but as the teacher, I certainly felt that.
Jeida Brooks: [17:29] Interesting. Well, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to share?
Bird Dierking: No. I would just thank you for the opportunity to share. I love this place. I could talk about it all day, every day. So thank you.
Jeida Brooks: [17:44] Awesome. Thank you for sharing.
Bird Dierking: [17:45] Thank you