Notable volunteer

A teenager sits in front of a classroom of a dozen elementary school students, guitar situated on his knee and begins to sing.
“What should we put on the bus?” asks Cayden Betts, a Jay County High School senior.
Betts is leading a summer special education class at General Shanks Elementary School in a session of music therapy, beginning with the classic “The Wheels on the Bus.”
Students go through round after round of the song, adding their own suggestions of ninjas chopping, pumpkin pie squishing and elephants stomping, on the “crazy bus.”
They go on to sing and motion to “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and end with the students’ favorite, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” with one student reiterating to the class that it’s from the movie “Toy Story.”
This is Betts’ second year volunteering to help with the school’s federally mandated extended school year for its special education class students who may be at a critical point of development or have regressed significantly in that development. Students in the summer session range from preschool- to middle school-age students.
Betts sees his six weeks in the class as an opportunity to begin work in what he hopes to learn in college, music therapy.
“Music therapy is so broad. This is one more thing under my belt as a possibility,” said Betts.
He explains that there is a joy in seeing an almost immediate reaction when he begins playing his guitar and singing.
“It brightens them up, and it kind of releases that weird energy that makes them anxious and jumpy,” said Betts. “They’re so calm afterwards.”
Teacher Susan Williams sees Betts as an asset to the team of two teachers and two aides who are in charge of the summer class.
“Cayden does a great job of using it as a way to get rid of distractions,” said Williams. “We use music as a way to teach them their name and address … we use music in almost everything we do.”
Betts sees his time with the students as a hands-on learning experience in patience and personal space that he wouldn’t learn from a book or classroom.
“The first thing I learned is that there’s no such thing as personal space in here. At all,” said Betts. “The first summer, that was the hardest thing to get over for me, was that they always want to give you a hug. To me, it was just weird at first, and I had to get used to it.
“Some things you can’t be taught, you just have to go through it. I’m sure in school they don’t teach you that you can’t have a bubble and those kinds of things.”
Betts said the dynamic of a special needs class is much different than that of any other class because the relationships are different, and he likes it that way.
“I think special needs classes work a lot better than other classes. There’s just something about it. It’s more of a family than it is a school,” said Betts. “One of the kids, every day he says that he feels loved by everyone, and he goes through all the names, and everyone is ‘Miss’ except for me. I’m ‘Mrs. Cayden.’ I don’t know. It just doesn’t bother me. It’s really nice.”
Williams sees the same kind of enthusiasm from the students, not just in their relationships but also in their class work.
“They’re the coolest kids in the world,” he said. “They want to learn. They’re excited. They’re not jaded. They’re the only kids in the world I know that when they get their homework, they say, ‘Yay! Paperwork!’”
Williams also sees the high school students’ volunteerism as advantageous for not only the students, but the teachers as well.
“The teachers in this program get so much from having the high school kids here and getting to see what they’re doing with the kids and watching them interact,” said Williams. “And it’s also another set of hands. I’ll never turn down extra hands.”



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