The morning started out quietly. Gnu and I were the only two people in the room as the main entrance door to the school just opened to let the scholars into the building and the busses were still unloading. Grr!, as he always does, as he is a car rider, is the first to arrive. S&T arrives next which indicates that the bus riding students are in the building. The surprise is that Knapper is the third person to arrive as he is a walker and is almost always the last to arrive. When Knapper walks into the room he immediately walks to his desk, crosses his arms on the top of the desk and then rests his forehead on his arms. I don't pay it too much attention as it is early and he is probably tired. With all the scholars now in the classroom, Gnu has them get out their morning worksheets as we are about the begin the day. When Gnu sees that Knapper still has his head on his arms she walks over to him and rubs his head a little thinking she is waking him up. When she removed her hand Knapper said to her, "leave me alone." Gnu and I make eye contact, no words are exchanged, and she heads to the front of the room to begin the day. About ten minutes later I walk over to Knapper desks, place my hand on his shoulder and shake him a little. Without raising his head he said to me, "leave me alone." Gnu and I make eye contact for the second time and we both know this is not a good situation. We got together off to the side of the room and it's decision time. We have two choices, continue the day with Knapper in the room or evacuate the room. Gnu chooses the later, I agree, and the scholars and Gnu are on their way to our safe place which is the library.
For reasons unknown, the demon, as I call it, has entered his head again. With the room empty I'm sitting at my desk and Knapper is directly in front of me. I choose to remain silent knowing that if I continue to try and make contact with him, he will escalate and say to me, "leave me the f..... alone." I'm not exactly sure how long I sat silent watching him but eventually he raised up his head and looked around the classroom. I'm still silent. He then leans over, looks inside his desk and grabs a piece of paper and I know immediately the escalation has begun and I'm very confident as to what is going to happen over the next several minutes. As Knapper begins tearing the paper into little pieces I text FBG first, as he is a member of our crisis team, to let him know what is going on in the classroom. I then text Gnu to tell her that Knapper is escalating. FBG responds back quickly and asks if I need help. I responded, "not yet." With all of the loose pieces of notebook paper torn into pieces, Knapper brings out his folders and spiral binders and continues shredding paper. At this point I still have not spoken to him as I know it will not help the situation. Apparently tired of shredding paper, he now starts to ball the paper up in his hands. As he does so, he looks around the room, selects a target, and throws the paper at the target. This continued for several minutes. Tired of throwing paper, he now brings out is pencil box. He opens the box, selects one pencil, looks at it, and then randomly tosses it across the room. He continues this process until the majority of his pencils have been tossed out of his pencil box. Next, he selects a dry erase marker and starts scribbling on his desk top and occasionally on his arms and pants with the marker. So far, he is following his usual progression as he escalates and with no objects thrown in my direction, I remain seated directly behind him.
With his desk thoroughly covered with dry erase marker scribbling, he stands up, stretches and looks around the classroom. As I expected he turns to his right and heads toward a table and chairs near the exterior windows of the classroom. He carefully moves the three chairs away from the table, slides the table away from the wall, and then starts to turn the table over onto its side. Rather than just let the table drop onto the floor he tries his best to carefully lay the table on its side. With the table on its side he studies its position and then moves it a little so the table forms a triangle with the corner walls of the classroom. Now satisfied with the table position he begins to build his tower. The first five chairs he chose are close to the table and he carefully moves them, turns them upside down, and places them next to the table. The next chair is at Huey's desk which is very close to my desk. As he picks up Huey's chair, he raises it up above his head so I stand up. He looked at me, turned around, and placed Huey's chair near the table. This process continued until there were seventeen chairs stacked around the table. At no time did he throw a chair into position. Each chair was carefully placed onto the tower.
Satisfied with his work, Knapper climbs up on the book case next to his tower and works his way into the back side of the tower and sits down on the floor. When he sits down, I sit down. There is silence for a few minutes and then Knapper says to me, "Mr. Schultz, there is a spider in the corner." "What kind of spider is it?" I ask him. "It's a daddy long legged spider," he says. "Is it a big one or a little one," I ask him. He responds, "it's a big one." "Are you allergic to spider bites," I ask him. "No," is the response and I go silent and continue watching him. After a couple minutes Knapper starts to climb out from behind his tower. As I watch him, I stand and move toward the classroom door as he is moving outside his normal progression. As he approaches me he says, "Mr. Schultz, I need to use the restroom." It's decision time for me. Do I block his way or let him use the restroom. During this whole tower building episode, he never was either verbally or physically aggressive. He just calmly went through his normal progression so I decided to let him us the restroom. As he exited the classroom I walked behind him. He went into the restroom, exited shortly, washed and dried his hands and started to walk back to the classroom. As he was walking toward the classroom, I turned to open the classroom door. With my back to him I hear, "bye." I turned back toward him and he is running down the hallway. As I watch him run, I pull out my cellphone and text FBG to let him know Knapper is running the hallways and heading to the second floor. I also text a second crisis team member who is on the second floor and ask this crisis team member watch for Knapper. Rather than follow Knapper down the hall and up the stairs I decided to take the elevator and that was my mistake. When I get to the second floor I exit the elevator and can now look down each hallway and he is not in sight.
I'm now getting a little worried as I've lost track of him. I head back down the elevator and walk toward the offices to tell the BigB2 and/or LittleBB that Knapper is running the hallways and I've lost track of him. I also know I can check the security cameras in the main office and hopefully see him on one of the cameras. When I get to the office I tell the Administrative Czar what is going on and he tells me Knapper is outside the building on the side near the interstate highway and the BigB2 and LittleBB are pursuing him. I believe my response was, "damn" and I'm now running to the west exit door of the school. When I'm outside on the street I look left and right and I don't see anyone. I go back to the office to tell the Administrative Czar that I can't find them. He tells me they are at this street location and I'm off running again and this time I see them about a block and a half from the school. As I'm running I see that FBG is at the location and has a hold of Knapper and he keeping him from going farther from the school. When I arrived at the street location I apologize to the BigBig2 and look at FBG and quietly say, "what do you need me to do?" He looks at me, shakes his head to indicate do nothing for now. As I'm standing there I explain to the BigB2 what happened and said to her it was my fault he got outside the building as I thought he was running up to the second floor and failed to see that he started up the stairs and then turned around the left the building.
As I'm standing on this street corner watching Knapper continue to struggle I asked the BigB2 about getting him back to school. She quietly informed me that she has called the school police for assistance. Shortly after this conversation my cellphone rings and I have a text message from Gnu. "I'm nearing crisis mode and I need help quickly," is how the message read. I inform the BigB2 and I'm now running back to the school and the library. When I arrived in the library, Gnu was trying to corral all the scholars back to our classroom. Once in the classroom the scholars look at the condition of the classroom and Oil says, "what happened in here?" Gnu tells them it is none of their business and then assigns each scholar a task to put the classroom back in its normal condition. While returning the classroom to its normal condition Gnu and I get the word that the school police arrived took Knapper home.
This was the fourth time that demons have entered Knapper's head since arriving in our classroom last school year. Never, up to this point, he had ever run away from the classroom. I caught a huge break after losing track of Knapper, one of the classroom teachers saw him outside the building and called the main office. I had to make a decision as Knapper was running from me. I knew from previous experience that if a pursue a scholar on the run the scholar will just run faster. With this in mind, I let him run. My mistake was I should have following him down the hallway rather than take the elevator to the second floor. If I did this I would have seen him leave the building and could have chased him down. That mistake on my part could have been costly and it is one that I will not make again.
It's a beautiful Sunday morning. There is not a cloud in the sky and the outdoor temperature is around sixty-four degrees. Today is opening day for the National Football League and my part time editor, part time consultant, and full time spouse and I have been invited to the Colts game against the Detroit Lions. Our seats are near the tunnel onto the field that the Lions will use to enter and leave the playing field. We are seated between the five and ten yard line about fifteen rows up. As the Lions either enter or exit the playing field I'll wave so you can see me.
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