Sydni Downing arrived at Tri-Valley last year, and almost everything in her life was new. She had a new school, a new position, and a role the district had never had before.

Then she learned she had breast cancer.

"There was a lot of new stuff all at once," she said.

Downing went through chemotherapy in the fall while beginning her work as Tri-Valley's first student success interventionist. Treatment continued through the school year, and she is now approaching her final treatment.

It would be easy to tell her story primarily as one of perseverance through illness. But Downing tells it differently. Coming to Tri-Valley, she said, was a "saving grace."

"I'm here, and I'm focused on the students and what I'm doing to help everyone in the building-students and staff."

And what she is doing begins with something remarkably simple. She wants children to know somebody sees them.

Downing describes her position as part behavior interventionist and part counselor. Her background prepared her unusually well for that combination. She spent five years working at an autism center as a social skills therapist and consultant, then worked in mental health as an outreach counselor in McLean County schools.

At Tri-Valley, she has helped introduce Zones of Regulation, which teaches children to identify their emotional state and develop strategies for managing it. Blue, green, yellow, and red describe different zones, but none is inherently bad.

"All of the zones are okay," Downing said. "It's okay to feel all these feelings."

The objective isn't to teach children that difficult feelings are wrong. It is to help them recognize what they are experiencing and learn how to regulate themselves well enough to move forward.

"If they're not feeling connected and they're not feeling regulated, they're not going to learn at school."

Last year, one student was having a particularly difficult beginning to the school year. Downing used an approach called "two by ten." For two minutes a day over 10 days, she gave the student her undivided attention. No agenda. No lecture about behavior. The conversation didn't even have to be about school.

"You give them your undivided attention," she said. "They can talk about anything."

Slowly, trust develops.

Downing knows something about being the person who needs others to notice. While she was spending her first year trying to make children feel seen, the people around her were doing much the same thing for her.

Colleagues brought meals for the organized meal train, so her family didn't have to worry about dinner during treatment. People remembered when she had chemotherapy and asked how she was feeling. If she wasn't up to walking across the building, someone offered to bring a student to her.

"We got it," Downing remembers them saying. "You can take a breather for a little bit."

Her principal, Mr. Swearingen, gave her professional freedom and confidence to mold this new role into something so unique and special.

She remembers feeling trusted by Mr. Swearingen to have creative ideas and problem solve from a different lens.

For a woman hired to help children understand that they are more than whatever difficult thing they might be experiencing at a particular moment, there is beautiful symmetry in that. Tri-Valley saw Downing the same way she wants children to see themselves.

Not as a diagnosis. Not simply as an employee. As a whole person.

"We're not just two-dimensional."

Perhaps that understanding reaches back further than her professional training. Downing remembers being told often that she was a shy and sensitive child herself. Looking back, she thinks someone in a role like hers might have helped.

Someone to say, "You can feel your feelings." Someone to tell her it was okay to be exactly who she was.

"Just be seen in the moment," she said.

Now she gets to be that person for someone else.

The job has also woven itself into her own family. Downing and her husband have two boys, a first grader and a second grader at Tri-Valley. Recently she walked into her second grader's classroom to teach a Zones lesson. He sat there smiling at her the whole lesson.

"He's so proud of you," this writer observed.

"I know," she said.

At the end of Downing's first year, her mentor asked whether she was coming back.

"Yeah, heck yeah, I'm coming back," Downing replied.

There really wasn't much of a question. She gets to talk about emotions and social skills. She gets to be silly. She gets to be a listening ear.  She gets to give hugs and high fives. She gets to help children through hard moments, while occasionally catching a glimpse of her own boys in the hallways

"This role is like everything that I would..." she began, before the sentence gave way to the list of things she loves about it.

Maybe the unfinished sentence says enough.

During a year when Downing needed people to make room for everything she was carrying, she found a school willing to do exactly that. Now, every day, she tries to make that same room for a child.

Two minutes at a time, if that's what it takes.

Feel what you feel. Be who you are. You are seen here.