The best thing we can do is just get to know someone.

Sometimes that takes coming back each day with an open heart, other times, it means opening up and sharing your thoughts.

St. Joseph’s Nancy Kidd has spent her life trying to do both.

Kidd grew up in an era when the professional choices for women were to become a nurse, a secretary or a teacher.

“As far as careers, we were never encouraged to do the things men are doing,” Kidd said.

Sitting in an office all day was not appealing to Kidd. She decided to explore a teaching career so she could provide a nurturing and helpful environment for children.

Kidd taught outside Champaign-Urbana for two years before returning home to be closer to friends and family. Back in East Central Illinois, she got a job at the public library running their bookmobile.

Within a few years, she was looking for a change, to get back into the classroom, when a former bookmobile patron asked if she would be interested in working part-time as a teacher at the juvenile detention center.

Kidd wrote that she knew juvenile detention centers existed, but she’d never considered working in one.

“I wasn’t expecting it to be warm and welcoming, but it looked downright depressing — the bars on the windows, the run-down front porch entrance, and the tall chain-link fence enclosing the outdoor recreation area (gatherthegood.com: 2016.06.08),” she said.

Working in less than ideal conditions, in the basement she described as “a drab room with exposed pipes overhead and a window air conditioner filling one of the two tiny basement windows,” before the group moved to a new facility 10 years later, Kidd could have just passed for the status quo.

But, instead, Kidd realized her dream job.

“It was meant to be,” she said in an interview.

Kidd said the children who came in were between the ages of 10 and 17 years old.

“I knew I wasn’t going to make any miraculous changes,” Kidd said. “So I just wanted to give them some feel that they had a positive educational experience while they were there. And something that we should bring everybody together.”

Kidd decided to start the day off with the “Birdie Song” to wake the students up.

“I told them someday they might have children — some already did — and that it was important to interact with them by reading to them and singing with them. I told them this could be one song for their parental toolbox,” Kidd wrote in “Detention Kids Gain Lasting Wings with ‘Birdie Song’ Surprise.”

While some of the students felt silly and childish singing the song the first time, Kidd said they ended up loving it, coming in ready to sing it every morning, and sometimes wanting to sing it multiple times a day.

“That was one little thing we could do together,” Kidd said.

Singing was a gateway to other information for Kidd’s students.

Kidd said teaching the students a full curriculum would have been hard because the students were so transient.

“It’s so hard because you might have a kid for one day or two days or months, or we’ve had them for up to a year,” she said.

Oftentimes, the students would end up back in her classroom, though.

No matter the length of time they were with Kidd, she wanted them to learn more than just geography and facts. She wanted them to feel good about themselves in an educational setting.

“So many times they have bad experiences with school because they haven’t been the best behaved in school or they’ve gotten labels, and then were passed along with these labels,” she said.

“This was a chance for them to have a clean slate. They were away from their peers, they were away from these images they had of themselves.

“They responded wonderfully. They were nurturing one another.”

When the detention center superintendent, who was also employed by the Regional Office of Education, got breast cancer, Kidd said the students rallied around her.

“The kids would say, ‘Hi Miss Connie, how are you today?’ and go beyond what many adults would do. It was just mindblowing,” Kidd said.

After Kidd retired from her post six years ago, she wanted others to know that the children she worked with were more than meets the eye.

With friends, Kidd tossed around the idea of writing a book. She enrolled in a writing course at Parkland where she was the only student who did not reflect on their life, but focused on the students within the detention center.

After the class, she decided to start her blog instead.

“I’m trying to get that word out that maybe we shouldn’t be judging so quickly,” she aid. “Maybe we should take the whole person into account. Look at these good things that these kids are capable of.

“These kids have worth too; they have value,” she continued. “We need to recognize that in each other.”

Struggling with today’s technology, Kidd’s friend, Laura Mabry volunteered to help her set up and manage her website and taught her a few things about social media. The platform gave Kidd a way to grow an audience.

In the year that Kidd has been writing publicly, she has also grown.

There were other stories that struck her, like talking about her mother or sharing insight about Mother’s Day when a woman is going through life’s worse circumstances.

“I just feel compelled to get the stories out there,” Kidd said.

The response she’s received from sharing stories has encouraged her to write more, while also venturing into sharing personal stories and insights.

“I guess I was a little reluctant to kind of put myself out there,” Kidd said. “It’s one thing talking about the kids, the students, but sharing some of my own struggles or concerns, I wasn’t sure about that.

“But it’s becoming easier.”

Kidd describes herself as a timid child who did not want to rock the boat.

Now at 65, she’s feeling a little more confident.

“I am finally content to say this is who I am,” she said. “And it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t follow along with what other people think.

“That’s kind of an amazing thing to feel comfortable in my own skin and not worry about the judgment of others.”

Kidd said she never knows what will strike a chord with her readers, but she has learned that sometimes it only takes one story to touch one reader.

“I’m just grateful that it makes me feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing right now,” Kidd said.

The post Kidd created a space of belonging for students who were in tough situations first appeared on SJO Daily.

Click here to learn more about Nancy Kidd, former juvenile detention center teacher and St. Joseph resident.

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