I think I have mentioned before, that prior to this internship I worked for six years for the county run human services department as a social worker. As part of this job, I occasionally had to complete child abuse investigations. This week one of my counseling kiddos asked her teacher to find me because she felt "sad." I got an email from the teacher, asking if it was possible for me to come by. I got the email at around 12:30 and school ended in an hour and a half. It was surprising to get this request because this student is extremely shy and I typically feel like she doesn't want to go with me because she is so timid. BUT early on in our sessions I had told her that if she needed me she should tell her teacher and I would try my bestest to get there. So, although I was at another school site I managed to find a half hour to run to the kiddo's school and pull her with 10 minutes remaining in the school day.
I went to her classroom, still holding my purse since I didn't have time to set it down in the office and pulled her into a private room. When I initially asked her what was up, she started to play shy with me again. Although not my typical style, I was pretty blunt with her and said something along the lines of, "ok girlie, I know something is up or you wouldn't have asked for me. So spill it." She looked at the ground for a couple of moments and then began to share with me that the night prior her mom had "hit" her on her back. My brain seemed to automatically switch back to my old days as an investigator. I started out by asking what had happened before that and she said that mom was mad at her for not following directions so she hit her on the back. Kiddo said it didn't hurt anymore and gave me permission to check out her back (there were no marks/bruising) she said that mom doesn't typically hit her, but it does happen every once in a while. At this point in time I am kinda uncertain as to what to do. I ask her how she feels about going home that day and she states that she is a little scared. I ended up marching her over to my supervisor who then directed us to the principal. We shared the story with him and he thinks it over and decides to send her home.
Following this I had to run back to my site of the day and get my wits about me to run an IEP. The IEP went fine, but was amazingly chaotic because mom brought three kids under the age of 5 to the meeting. Talk about noisy!
After the meeting as I was desperately attempting to make sense of the mess on my desk following another day of running from place to place my supervisor, Mr. H., calls. Mr. H was checking on me and wanted to hear how everything had worked out with my counseling kid. So I give him the play by play. He advising me against playing investigator in the future (too true - gotta get rid of that programming in my head!) but tells me to follow up with the kidlet the next day. So I did. She was fine. Nothing new happened, but I think I will keep tabs on this topic over the next couple of weeks. I didn't do a child abuse report because I do not feel she is being abused, but should she tell me a similar incident in the future, I may have to change my opinion. Hopefully that isn't the case though!
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