“Well, that’s all for today, then, and we’ll be seeing you tomorrow,” she said, flashing me a wide smile. “We’re very excited to have you on board, Mrs. Spiegel. I think you’ll do great things for our girls.”

I hoped so. I arrived early the next morning, bringing along some of my toys and teddy bears to store in the supply closet. I also had some colorful posters with motivational quotes, which I got to work arranging on the walls of the small tutoring room.

Eventually, the hallways began bustling with noise as teachers and students arrived. I was perched on a chair debating whether I should move the poster saying “Be Yourself — Everyone Else Is Taken” a little further to the right, when the door opened abruptly, knocking me off balance. I grabbed at the back of the chair and steadied myself.

“Oh — my goodness! I didn’t realize anyone was in here. Who are you? The new para?” A woman with a curly auburn wig greeted me breathlessly. She took in the posters on the wall and raised an eyebrow. “And — uh — what’s the décor about?”

I stepped down from the chair, trying to salvage my dignity. “I’m Yaeli Spiegel, school social worker. I’ll be using this room as an office for sessions, and the posters are to create the right atmosphere, spark conversation…” I trailed off when I saw the skeptical look on her face.

“Ahh.” Auburn lady looked nonplussed. “Well, I guess we’re sharing a room then. I teach students math and reading one-on-one, and we use this room. I’m sure Mrs. Markowitz told you.”

I nodded.

“Thing is…” She stepped inside and tapped a fingernail against the nearest poster: a giant bumblebee with the banner “Bee Happy!” “These posters… they’re a little distracting. I don’t think the other teachers will appreciate having them up, either. Some of the kids we tutor are super distractable. They’ll spend all session staring at the walls. Do you think you could, I don’t know, maybe just put them up for your sessions?”

I stared at her. Was she for real?

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” I told her. “I might have ten or twenty sessions in a week, and it’s not practical to take them on and off the wall like that. I think your students will get used to them. Maybe the first time they’ll be distracted, but after a while, it’ll just be normal. You might even find them useful in encouraging them to have the right attitude.”

Auburn lady waved a hand. “Nah, it’s not my type. Listen, I’ll ask the other teachers what they think, but really, this is a tutoring room, not a therapy room, so we’ll have to go with the majority, okay?”

The majority. Lovely. Of course, that was going to be all of them against me.

Eventually, someone came up with some sort of useless compromise, keeping two of the posters up while the rest would have to come down. Mrs. Markowitz came to tell me that in the middle of the teachers’ room of all places (yet another downside of not having my own office).

“When we have a bigger building, of course you’ll be able to decorate the room,” she said soothingly, as if this were about color schemes and artwork instead of creating an essential atmosphere for therapeutic work.

One of the teachers offered to help me take down the posters. I turned down the offer. This whole thing was mortifying enough without anyone’s patronizing pity.

But even without my posters, thankfully, we soon settled into a regular routine. I loved working with my young clients, getting to know them and their struggles, their hopes and fears, making a real difference in their lives. This was what I’d entered the field for…

I had a busy schedule, with sessions booked every morning, although last-minute absences or changes necessitated a lot of juggling and switching things around. And the tutoring room was booked nearly solid. Technically, tutoring sessions took place in the afternoon, but there was always “just this one” or “just that one,” plus I quickly realized that I ended up needing some times in the afternoons too.

“Aliza struggles to keep up in class, so we really can’t have her miss anything that will be too hard for her to catch up,” one teacher told me.

The thing was, Aliza loved art and gym, the only classes she really excelled in. Was it fair to pull her out then for a session?

“How about you take her during a review class in the afternoon? ” her teacher finally suggested. “It’s not as bad as having her miss learning new material.”

That was fine with me, but a quick check of the tutoring room schedule showed that Wednesday afternoon was absolutely full, with no room to squeeze in a ten-minute slot, let alone a full half-hour session.

I had one session booked for Wednesday afternoon myself, stuck between Miss Green’s and Mrs. Walfish’s tutoring sessions. If I moved Tzivia Deutsch to Monday morning, then I could fit Aliza in there. But that didn’t go over so well with Tzivia’s mother and teachers, who all wanted Tzivia to be in Chumash class and would rather her miss an afternoon class.

These things would still come up if I had my own office, I reminded myself.

But they wouldn’t be nearly as complicated, a cynical voice in me piped up.

There was also the supply-closet issue. True to her word, Mrs. Markowitz had arranged for me to have my own key, but she didn’t seem to realize how frustrating it was to schlep piles of toys and teddy bears from the office to the tutoring room before every single session. Then if my hands weren’t full enough, there were the files I needed so I could take notes in session and review them after. Of course, most sessions ended right before another teacher showed up to use the room for tutoring, before I had a chance to finish my notes. So I’d go to the teacher’s room, toting teddy bears and files, to finish up my notes, but the environment was hardly conducive for the work I needed to do. I just didn’t have the headspace, privacy, or time to gather my thoughts and process the sessions, not with teachers coming in and out, asking questions, interrupting me, or even leaning over to see what I was doing.

And then there were the meetings with the parents that were always difficult to schedule. I had to coordinate my availability, the parents’ schedules, and the room. And even then, if they turned up late or we ran overtime, we were stuck. I wished the school had more space, but more than that, I wished that they would understand why this was so challenging for me as a professional.

“Use the teachers’ room,” Mrs. Markowitz suggested to me, when I finally approached her to say that it wasn’t working, and I needed a room to use for meetings with parents.

The teachers’ room? But there were always people in there.

“I — what about the teachers, where will they go?” I stammered.

“It’s fine, they won’t listen, you’ll sit in a private corner,” she said comfortably. “Most teachers do that.”

I knew that — but teachers weren’t therapists, they didn’t have legal and ethical requirements to keep things absolutely confidential. I couldn’t sit there and talk about a child I would be seeing in front of six other teachers, all of whom were pretending not to listen.

“Look, we have to make it work right now, until we have the facilities to offer you a private office,” Mrs. Markowitz said.

She was always saying that kind of thing. I knew it all, but I still thought they could stretch themselves to make it work.

And then there were the interruptions in the sessions themselves. The teachers seemed to think it wasn’t an issue to knock on the door for a quick question or to get something, right in the middle of a session. They seemed to treat therapy as another kind of tutoring, as if I were teaching the kid social skills or something and there was no issue with any of them popping in with a finger on their lips and sneaking past me to “just get my notes from the closet.”

I figured it might just be a lack of education. Maybe they just didn’t know about the way therapy worked, with full confidentiality and containment in the sessions, no less for children than adults. I decided to prepare a small informational booklet and give it out to all the staff, explaining how my work with the children needed total privacy and asking them to please refrain from coming inside during sessions.

Mrs. Markowitz gave me a funny look when I showed her the booklets, but she didn’t seem to mind me distributing them. And it really helped — for a few days. No one knocked on the door during sessions, and when Sarale Friedman’s slot ran slightly overtime, the teacher who was supposed to have the room next simply waited outside for five minutes. I made sure to thank her for that, and made a note to schedule Sarale’s sessions a little longer, so I’d have the extra window of time.

But it didn’t last long. And when things really came to a head, of course it had to happen during Michal Feiner’s slot.

Michal was a puzzle to me. I started seeing her at her mother’s request, something about outbursts at home and unpredictable behavior in school. And I quickly saw what she meant.

During our first session, she refused to say a word. She sat half-turned away from me, a blank expression on her face. I tried every trick in the book, to no avail. And then at the end of the session, she gave me a big smile and asked, “Can I come again next week?”

I blinked, momentarily speechless, but quickly regained my composure. “Sure. I’ll call you out of class at the same time.”

Michal’s mother called me that evening, gushing. “I don’t know what you did, but it was magic! Michal was so happy that you called her out of class. Please keep up whatever you’re doing!”

I was nonplussed. I debated telling Mrs. Feiner what exactly had happened, but I decided to hold off. Maybe Michal just needed to warm up. Maybe I should give it time.

The next week, Michal was waiting outside the classroom for me. She broke into a big smile when I came and practically danced into the room.

I decided to disregard the previous session, and just start fresh. And Michal seemed to feel the same way. She chattered eagerly about her favorite part of school (“Recess!”) and her least favorite (“Spelling tests!”), and seemed engaged and open.

But with session number three, we ran into a snag. Our regular time had been booked — one of the teachers had a meeting with a parent — and I had to rearrange my schedule. When I went to tell Michal that we’d be meeting a day later instead, she had a full-blown tantrum.

I stood in the hallway, feeling helplessly inadequate as Michal first sobbed, then begged, and finally stormed off in protest. She couldn’t regulate her emotions, that much was clear, but how could I even work on it with her if scheduling sessions was so triggering and so complicated?

I quickly learned that one step forward for Michal was inevitably followed by two steps back — and her sensitivity about anything to do with the room, our time slot, changes in schedule, or someone entering mid-session was sky-high. On a good day, she could answer questions blithely and show beautiful behavior and manners, but alternately, when something didn’t go her way, she could be stubborn, close-mouthed, and sometimes downright obnoxious. There was something going on, all the teachers agreed. But figuring out what was behind this dysregulation was going to be a slow process. And every frustrating change or disruption made it even slower.

Michal needed time. And space. And patience. And constant reassurance that I wasn’t going anywhere, that our space was contained, that the sessions would run reliably each week, that no one would interrupt us in the middle.

Any change in the room — the seat moved to the other side of the table — could clam her up for an entire session. And an interruption by another teacher could set me back by a month.

And during my ninth session with Michal, it was Mrs. Markowitz herself who had to interrupt.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Spiegel,” she said, sounding genuinely contrite. “But would you please be able to relocate to the conference room? The electrician we’ve been waiting for is here now, and he needs to check the wiring in this room.”

I couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t wait, what, 20 minutes? He couldn’t check another room first? This electrician had been messing around with us for days, first canceling, then postponing, then finally showing up completely unexpectedly — couldn’t he wait 20 minutes? And this was Michal, of all students!

We moved. We didn’t have a choice. But when we sat down, Michal’s lips were clamped shut. Practically speaking, our session was over.

I tried in vain to get her to pick up where we left off. But it was impossible; her posture was hunched, her eyes hooded, and she refused to speak a single word.

I understood her. We’d been in the middle of a conversation that was hard for her, and she’d just begun opening up, feeling like this was a secure place, somewhere — someone — she could trust. And then, right in the middle of her sacred time, we’d been interrupted and sent to the conference room , with its long, intimidating dark-wood table and paneled walls. This was the room used for board meetings, or for staff trainings. It wasn’t a suitable therapeutic environment for a child — especially not one who struggled with trusting and opening up.

The next week, she simply refused to attend the session.

Of course, Michal’s parents wanted to know what was going on. They came in the very next day for a meeting. Seated in the same conference room, wincing at the memory, I was forced to concede that my work with Michal hadn’t gotten very far. Michal’s father, an imposing man with a permanent crease between his brows, frowned deeper.

“I will allow myself to say that I hoped we would see more progress at this stage,” he rumbled, fixing me with a steely look. “Michal has seen you a total of nine times. I’m surprised that there is no visible progress at all to speak of — and that you yourself admit to that. And yesterday, she refused to go to her session — we find that very worrying.”

I felt my heartbeat quicken at the injustice of it. “We actually have been making progress, albeit slowly,” I said. “However, the environment is not exactly ideal for the kind of work I’d like to do with her. This works against us, and significantly slows the process. And as for this week’s session, there was an unfortunate change last week that was out of our control. I think that made her insecure about therapy, and that’s why she wouldn’t come.”

Mrs. Feiner, a small, delicate woman, fluttered her lashes and leaned forward. “The environment?” she asked in a high-pitched voice, giving her husband a significant look. “Would you be able to give me some examples of that?”

I told them about the room, the lack of availability, the sudden changes, and what had happened during Michal’s last session. With a stab of guilt at badmouthing the school, I quickly added, “Listen, it’s a new school, they know the setup is an issue, but in the meantime…” I spread out my hands. “I’m just trying to work with what I’ve got. It’s not Michal’s fault at all, but it’s hampering her progress, and yes, things are going to take a lot longer than they might have otherwise.”

Mr. Feiner cleared his throat. “Thank you for telling me this, Mrs. Spiegel. I’m going to take care of it.”

At the door to the room, Mrs. Feiner looked back at my startled face. “My husband is on the board of the school,” she said. “He’s going to make sure things change around here.”

If I could tell Mrs. Markowitz one thing, it would be: I need you to support me by giving me the resources I need to do my job.

Mrs. Markowitz

Running a fledgling school is challenging, wonderful, and incredibly stressful, all at the same time.

There’s that exhilarating sense of newness, and the chance to build something completely new, unhampered by past rules or decisions. But there’s no pre-existing structure, no veteran core staff to rely on, many questions, and many limitations.

We didn’t have a great building, but we didn’t have the budget to expand or build one either. We wanted cutting-edge, the best staff, the highest quality equipment, but until we attracted enough students, we simply didn’t have the funding for everything. There were a lot of decisions to make, a lot of priorities to think about, what came first, what came second, and what would simply have to wait another year or two.

A school social worker made its way into the budget. With awareness of mental and emotional health difficulties at an all-time high, and with parents anxious to have issues handled competently as they arose instead of waiting until they exploded, this move would show that we were current and professional.

Finding the right candidate wasn’t simple. The highly professional ones demanded impossibly high salaries and the underqualified ones wouldn’t give the right message or work effectively with the students. Then Yaeli Spiegel applied. She was young and fresh out of school, but seemed older. She had great references from her internship, seemed to understand children well, and had an air of competence that would impress the parents. We hired her.

From the get-go, though, things were difficult.

First it was the room. She wanted her own room. Never mind that our two secretaries pretty much shared a desk and one of the classrooms already had makeshift partitions down the middle to accommodate two classes at once. We simply didn’t have the space to give an entire room for the school social worker, who would be seeing five or six students weekly.

Mrs. Spiegel was upset about that, something about furniture and equipment, so we tried to accommodate. I offered her space in the office supply closet; tried to compromise when she wanted to hang posters all over the tutoring room, to the chagrin of the other teachers; and asked the other teachers to respect her scheduled sessions to give the students a sense of security and consistency. But she still wasn’t happy: there were problems with the room, with the timings, with making changes to the schedule, with where to host meetings with parents, with teachers walking through the room she was working in. It seemed like every other day I came to school to be confronted with a litany of complaints.

“We’re a new school,” I tried telling her. “We’re doing what we can, but we have limitations. We know it’s not ideal — but the entire building isn’t ideal. We need to make it work.”

Personally, I thought it wouldn’t harm the students to learn this, either. This was resilience, it was life skills — sometimes we can use the room, sometimes we need to make do with something else. Wasn’t it part of her job to help them handle that?

My dissatisfaction aside, the students seemed happy to go to her, and from what I heard from the teachers, she did good work. Mrs. Spiegel was definitely professional, definitely knew her stuff. The parents were happy, they found her knowledgeable and empathetic, and her caseload grew from four to thirteen in just a few months.

But the rigidity, the impossible expectations, were starting to wear me down.

“We’re all struggling with the building,” I said once. “Look at Mrs. Schwartz’s classroom, she has 15 students in that long, narrow room where she can barely see the girls at the back. And Miss Kantor who takes the girls for gym — she uses their regular classroom and they have to shift the desks back and forth each time and lay out mats because we don’t have a gym. Everyone’s doing their best in a difficult situation.”

Mrs. Spiegel didn’t take the hint. “I understand, but this is about the students’ wellbeing,” she emphasized. “I simply can’t have teachers knocking on the door and walking in, mid-session. A child’s therapy session must be no less private and safe than an adult’s. Would they want someone walking in while they were in therapy?”

“Look, it could be that the teachers just don’t realize that,” I said. “Why don’t you speak to them privately and ask them not to come into the room while you’re in session?”

Mrs. Spiegel went one better. She actually typed up a leaflet explaining her job, the legal and ethical requirements, and her requests from the teachers, and marched down to my office to get my approval to hand it out.

I thought it was a little… much. The teachers wouldn’t necessarily appreciate being patronized like this; many of them were older than her, and Mrs. Spiegel, for all her dazzling qualifications, was young and inexperienced. I also wasn’t sure  why it was such a big deal. Teachers kept their supplies in the tutoring room closet; so what if they needed to pass through quietly?

But I wanted to help her out, and she seemed so determined to give over her message. I told her to go ahead.

There was a backlash. No one confronted Mrs. Spiegel directly — the teachers seemed unsure how to handle her — but I heard all about it.

“Look, I understand, it’s hard to have the flow of a session interrupted, but honestly, she doesn’t have a right to make all these rules,” Mrs. Tauber said. She looked upset. “I needed to get my phone from the room, I had been using it as a stopwatch during a session, and now I needed to leave school. Okay, it was my fault, I left it there, but honestly, all I did was knock. I even waited outside so she could stop at a convenient place in the conversation. I told her I just needed my phone, and that it was right near the door. And she actually had the chutzpah to tell me off, in front of the student!”

I frowned. That didn’t sound good.

“She asked if I’d seen the memo she sent around, and said that during her sessions, the room is inaccessible,” Mrs. Tauber continued. “And then finally she brought me the phone, not before adding something like ‘Please make sure this doesn’t happen again.’ And the way she blocked the door, as if she had to protect the girl from me… It’s just not right. I think she’s giving the wrong messages.”

I wasn’t sure about wrong messages, but it definitely sounded a little… extreme. Inflexible. But again, she was doing her job well, and I hoped things would settle down as everyone adjusted to the situation.

But then the electrician showed up.

Getting him to come down to the school had been a nightmare. He’d canceled on us last minute, promised to come the next day after school but didn’t, and finally turned up for a visit in the middle of the school day — “because he happened to be in the area.” I figured we’d better just work with him before he disappeared again.

We’d been having issues for months with flickering lights and fuses blowing, and since he was the one who had laid the wiring, we needed him to figure out what had gone wrong.

And of course, the fuse box was located in the small tutoring room.

“Who’s in there now?” I asked Dina, the secretary. “We’ll have to ask them to move somewhere else, so Mr. Mett can have a look at what’s going on.”

Dina checked the schedule. “It’s Mrs. Spiegel, with the Feiner girl from second- grade,” she told me.

Mrs. Spiegel. Oh, no.

I’d have to deal with this myself. No one else wanted to interrupt a session of hers, not after Mrs. Tauber’s story with the phone.

From outside, I could hear the murmur of voices. I couldn’t make out any words, but it sounded like there was a conversation going. A shame to interrupt it, but the electrician was liable to leave if we didn’t let him start ASAP.

I knocked and stuck my head in the door.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Spiegel,” I said. “We have the electrician outside, and he needs to come into this room. I’ve unlocked the conference room upstairs for you, can you please relocate the session there ?”

Mrs. Spiegel looked taken aback. “We have just under 20 minutes left, Mrs. Markowitz,” she said. “Is it possible for him to wait? It’s not so simple to move now.”

I glanced at Michal Feiner. Her face was blank and shuttered, with no hint that just a minute ago she’d been engaged in animated conversation. What a pity.

“I’m so sorry,” I said again. “I wouldn’t have interrupted if I didn’t have to.”

I expected a serious complaint after that incident, and I got it. Mrs. Spiegel had a lot to say: how Michal had completely shut down, how the tentative progress they were making was lost, how the school has to put the wellbeing of the students before anything else. At that point I stopped her. The school’s priorities are for the management to decide, not any employee, no matter her credentials.

“I hear you, Mrs. Speigel, and I’m sorry about the unfortunate timing,” I said over and over. “Sometimes, we simply don’t have a choice. I’m sure you’ll do great work with Michal, even with this setback. Yes, it may take some time to rebuild that trust, but you’re not starting from scratch, and you’ll get back on track. Hopefully, this was just a one-off situation, and we won’t need to interrupt you again.”

“Maybe the electrician was a one-off, but it seems like there’s always something else.” Mrs. Spiegel stubbornly stuck to her point. “The teacher forgot her phone or there’s a double booking on the schedule or someone wants to speak to me… I’d like to ask that no one ever interrupts a session, and that the room is completely private during the times it’s in use for therapy.”

“We’ll definitely try our best,” I assured her. But of course, that wasn’t good enough for her.

I only realized just how far she was taking her complaints when I got a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Feiner themselves. Mr. Feiner was a highly influential member of the board, and not the easiest person to deal with, either. But they had two daughters in the school, Michal in second-grade and Leila in first, and Mr. Feiner was one of our biggest supporters. When the secretary told me they were requesting an unscheduled meeting, I put aside the curriculum I was reviewing to speak to them.

“I don’t have much time,” Mr. Feiner began. “We came here to meet with the social worker, the one who’s seeing Michal.” He paused, deep dissatisfaction evident on his face. “We — my wife and I — have not been happy with Michal’s lack of progress in therapy. Apparently, though, the social worker feels hindered with the lack of support and resources that she needs. I heard something about being moved mid-session, which made Michal very upset?”

I kept up a calm expression, but inside, I was furious. Mrs. Spiegel had to involve the board? She went and told parents that we were ruining the child’s therapy process? How could she do that, when we were the ones who hired her, straight out of grad school, and were doing everything we could to accommodate her constant, unbending requests for things we struggled to provide?

I took a deep breath. “Mr. Feiner, I am well aware of the issues, and we are doing our best to work on them to everyone’s satisfaction,” I said. “However, Mrs. Spiegel is aware of the limitations we are working under, as a new school, and I’ve asked her to try working with us and making the best of the situation. I don’t believe Michal’s therapy regression will be permanent, but I do believe that these things can take time. Let’s give it a few more weeks, and after that we can meet all together — Mrs. Spiegel, myself, and both of you — in order to discuss how it’s going.”

And I’ll be there, to make sure Mrs. Spiegel is careful with what she says, I thought grimly as I escorted them to the door. To badmouth us to parents — let alone members of the board — was a low blow. Why couldn’t Mrs. Spiegel rise above her frustrations to make do with what we had — like every other teacher was doing?

If this continued, I’d be reluctant to renew her contract. But many students had built relationships with her…. I didn’t want to let her go, but something was going to have to change.

If I could tell Mrs. Spiegel one thing, it would be: As a new school, we have limitations, and we hired you to work with our students within those limitations, instead of constantly fighting for changes that we can’t provide.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 897)