Hello everyone, my name is Barry D. Petersen II. Government forms and people who don't know me very well often forget the fact that I am a sequel, which often makes mail very confusing for my father and I.
I went to school for Business Management. I've always liked the idea of being a leader-type, and I have a strange fondness for the simplicity of honest business. I also took a minor in Speech Communication, because I love learning about it. Honestly, I really enjoy to learn about a lot of things, and it helps me to keep myself occupied.
About halfway through my college experience, I decided to live off-campus. Now, I don't know if you remember the 2006-era era economy, but there were no jobs. I struggled to find work doing things that I had been doing, namely driving pizzas. And, with previous years of experience in pizza driving, I learned pretty quick that you didn't get to take home much of a paycheck. After the previous summer, I took home barely more than a thousand dollars, after expenses. Afterall, gas was pretty expensive back then, though it's pretty expensive right now, so that may not come to you as all that much of a surprise.
So, I went to a job placement center to work as a temp. I got a warehouse position, dragging boxes in and out of trailers, stacking them. The work was... brutal. The trailers were not refrigerated, so they'd be hot and dark. I'd spend about 12 hours moving boxes, no one really talking. I survived about 2 weeks, and I loathed it. I went to bed when I got home, and woke up then went to work. Life was a dark room carrying boxes in silence.
That same summer was my sister's first job at a summer day camp for kids and teens who had special needs. She was going on field trips, meeting people, being part of a team... And yet, I hadn't even considered this a job opportunity. Didn't even cross my mind. Sometimes I'm a little oblivious, so that may take part of the blame, but part of it was simply that I did not realize that special needs was part of MY world. I mean, I wasn't, like, delusional. I know that it was part of THE world, I just didn't think it had anything to do with me. Without any positive or negative connotation, it sort of was like a 'separate but equal' world. You may have heard that phrase before. That's why I wrote it. See? I'm a clever author.
It wasn't until the next summer came along that I considered working for the same summer day camp. My mother, actually, suggested it. She had stressed that I sort of needed a job to, you know, feed myself. She is a special needs teacher during the year, by the way, but don't let that fool you. She just knew that I was going to find a way out of working at all. Oh my teenage years, how I miss you. I started to come up with reasons I couldn't do it. "I don't know if I'd get along with people with special needs (I don't know how I would have phrased it at this time, but I sure as hell didn't have 'people-first-language' down)", "What if I mess up?" My mother, calmly and simply stated, "All you have to do is be a friend to a person who has special needs. They take you on field trips, and have fun doing things, and all you really need to do is let them have fun."
This wasn't wholly correct, by the way. I was terrified that I, the sort of whimsical, forgetful person that I tend to be, might do something like lose a person, or not know how to stop someone from walking into the street or something. She reminded me that I could go back to working my warehouse job, and look at that, I was suddenly a Camp Counselor at a Summer Camp for kids and adults who had special needs. My first parent meeting reminded me of my original fears: I know, when I think about the whole of the family, and my contact with the mother of the first person that I worked with, that she was a kind lady. And yet, the only like I can remember, verbatim, that she said during that meeting was "If I ever find out that you left (my child) in the bathroom alone, I will hunt you down and kill you."
Yeeesh. Tough crowd. No really though, she is honest and truly a very nice lady. Years after I worked with her child, she remembered my face, and gave me a big hug as we caught up a little. I'm NOT that great at staying in contact with people, so while some paras build fantastic relationship with the families of those they work with, this parent and I hadn't talked since the last note that she had written me, the last day I had worked with her child. The reunion was sweet and kind. Not that I have any doubt that she was totally serious about her death threat, mind you.
Nor would I blame her if she was. We weren't working with single-person bathrooms here, we were working with communal bathrooms with stalls. There are a lot of people who will bend over backwards to make sure our guys are safe and considered equal, and taken care of. And there are a lot of people who will take advantage of them. That's a true fact no matter where you go or what you do. People are sometimes great. People sometimes suck.
Despite all this, I managed to survive my first year. It was... lackluster. I don't feel like... My participant and I didn't bond, mind you, but I find that for many paraprofessionals, their first year on the job is sort of fruitless. Not a lot of emotional incentive to continue. And so I went to school, and graduated. I graduated a four year degree in three and-a-half years. That has very little to do with anything, but I just wanted to rub that in.
Actually, for that half year extra I 'saved' by graduating early, I ended up spending most of it unemployed, getting fat and drunk and depressed in my basement. It was 2009. I was looking for something that a degree in business management would help me obtain. Monster.com was offering jobs for Supervisors at Chuck E Cheeses, which I would have been glad to take if it didn't require ten years of restaurant management experience. Read that correctly. Not just ten years of management experience. Not just ten years working in a restaurant. To be qualified for that job, you had to, according to the company hiring, have worked as the manager of a restaurant for ten years.
Yeeesh. Tough crowd.
So, when summer came around, I was plenty happy to jump back to the summer camp, and make some temporary money at least. And you know, get out of the basement. Get some color. That sort of thing. Except, this time around, I had an amazing, fantastic time. I worked with a participant that I got along with exceptionally well, and we had a simply amazing summer. So much so, that people took notice of me, and when the end of the summer came, my supervisor said that she'd give me a recommendation towards the school district that she worked for during the year.
And that's what I did for two years. I worked in a school transitions program, out in a building in the community. I did a lot of things there, met some cool people. One of the things we had a lot of fear and anxiety about is where our guys would go when they graduated. And, in Illinois, 'graduated' means when that the state dumps them on the day of their 22nd birthday. We kept running into three things: 1) Programs that would not accept our individuals due to the perceived difficulty of taking them into their program. 2) Programs which could not accept our individuals into their programs because of being full already. 3) Programs which would accept our participants, take the money for the year, and then kick them out when our support staff stopped getting sent with them, usually soon after the day of their 22nd birthday.
And from there a couple of the paras and I thought we'd try our hand at a day program. I'll talk about this, probably a good deal later. For right now, I just want to say, it was a LOT harder AND a LOT easier than I thought it would be. This is a big thing that I've done that's given me a lot of bargaining power with employers afterwards, and, honestly, despite the investment, was not too hard to setup. That being said, the program closed due to too few participants, and not bringing in enough money.
I bumbled around for a little bit, working at a day school, and now working at an adult living facility and day center. It's... a big facility compared to the others I'd worked at before, and I'm still relatively new here, so I'm sure I'm going to get a unique perspective by working here.
That being said, that's most of what I have to say about the matter of my history. Obviously, it gets a lot more complex in there, especially at some places, but that will be for another time and another post.
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