Tim Barrus, New York Times

I worked in Special Education for years. With the “bad” kids. How bad were the Bad Boys. You don’t want to know. We had a category (for everything) called SED. Severely Emotionally Disturbed. In Special Ed, we threw a lot of words around. The language we used made us feel like we were doing something. You know these bad boys. You saw them. You sat on the bus with them. The boys were poor. They had bigs chips on their shoulders. They had criminal records that followed them. Most of them had been raped in State Detention (prison) facilities, all of which are ripe for rape. They had HIV which is monitored by the same blood draw that (without their knowledge) was looking for drugs. To a certain extent, the boys were right. Everything was against them. What I saw were kids who were trying to survive. The most compelling problems were not drugs or disease. The biggest problem was neglect. They had no money. They wore rags. They were hungry. Those bikes they rode did not belong to them. By 16, when it became clear to them that they would not be participating in drivers’ ed, they articulate a specific intuition that their existence was not only behind, but their lives were slipping from them. They would quit school. The boys were reduced to the quantum level of small particles that were ostensibly dangerous. They would run right through you. Exactly how unreachable was change. I gave them cameras. For many, it would turn into another life. I have a rotten attitude, but even I was shocked.