Lori Stern

By the way, Minnesota calls that emotional or behavioral disorders, EBD.

Other states have different names for the same thing.

One of those EBD teachers is Jesse Quakenut.

Everyone calls him Mr. K. Oh, come on in.

Come on in.

Okay, Aisha.

It's tucked away on the corner of the fourth floor, and I went to his class for the first time back in May of 2024.

There were about a dozen kids in the class, and every one of them had an EBD label.

Mr. K was the case manager for many of them,

and also their English and social studies teacher.

The day I visited, he started class with a vocabulary lesson.

Mr. K talks fast, so in case you missed it, the word class started with on this day was lecture.

Yeah, he had the word up on a PowerPoint slide.

Yeah, and Mr. K is really good at keeping it social and fast-paced.

But soon after this vocab lesson, he put on a video so that he could check in with each student, take their emotional temperature, make sure they knew he cared about them.

Yeah, that's right.

His name is Walt.

And we're only using his first name in this story because of the stigma associated with being labeled EBD.

When I met him, Walt was in 11th grade.

And Mr. K had been his teacher and case manager since he started at Central in 9th grade.