Nightshifts are tiring. They start at midnight and it doesn’t matter if you sleep all day prior to the shift; they are exhausting and take a toll on your body.
First thing you do when you start the shift is check every room before the Youth Care Leader (or the YCW on weekend, see earlier blog anatomy of a shift) leaves you alone in the house. You open the bedroom of the youth and pop on a flashlight – if you do not see skin under the covers of the bed you need to lift the covers – look for a toe and if there isn’t a toe you need to do a room search.
Once all the kids are accounted for you settle in and unpack – you can do homework or read but there is no TV because we don’t want to be disruptive to the kids sleeping. I do room checks every 15 minutes up until 4 a.m. In our policy it says room checks every half-an-hour but because kids can get antsy sometimes every 15 minutes is better until you know they are clocked out for the night.
On the Pilot Butte campus we share a night-float worker that switches between our house and Jordan House next door to help with any issues that may have arisen during the night and to provide an extra hand in helping youth get up in the morning if required.
Depending on the youth and where they go to school, we then start waking up youth. In-town youth have to be out the door by 7:50 a.m., kids that go to school on campus at Schaller need to be out the door at 8:50 a.m. Some kids want to be up at 6 a.m. and some don’t want to wake up until 15 minutes before they have to be out the door. It’s good to stager their wake up times due to the fact that it’s a lot of kids in a unit with one staff and one housemother.
On week days breakfast is come as you go, with the kids eating as the get up and make their way to the kitchen and then we leave for school, night shifts walks the kids across to Schaller while the housemom drives the in-town school kids into Regina.
In our house, as a full-time youth care worker, I work five night shifts in a row a month. A part-time will only work two in a row but they are on the weekends. It takes an adjustment to start nightshifts and to go off them. It’s hard on the body.
