Poverty and Education

According to a brief article in the February 1st KC Star (More Aid Sought for At-Risk Pupils), "The Kansas City, Kan., School District had 800 students, or one out of every 24, identified as homeless last year." It seems like an amazing statistic, but I can believe it after the 4 years I spent as library media specialist at one of their high schools. The ones who's stories I knew weren't homeless as in sleeping under bridges, but bouncing from hotel to hotel, relative to relative, and the like, with no stable place to live. They tried, but it was sometimes hard for them to see school as a priority when life had more pressing concerns.

I also recently read an editorial from the January 30th New York Times (not available for free on their website, but it can be found with library databases) titled The Lost Children: "One of the weirder things occurring in American education is the disappearance of kids -- especially black and Hispanic kids -- from high school." And:

This is an underrecognized, underreported crisis in American life. Far from preparing kids for college, big-city high schools in neighborhoods with large numbers of poor, black and Latino youngsters are just hemorrhaging students. The kids are vanishing into a wilderness of ignorance. If the dropout rate were somehow reversed in a city like Los Angeles, there wouldn't be enough schools to accommodate the kids.

Again, this is something my experience can attest to. Each year we had 450-500 kids enroll as freshmen, yet were only graduating 150-200 in each senior class. I don't know where they went or what they did with themselves, but it wasn't school.

Youngsters who drop out of high school are much less likely to be regularly employed, or to escape poverty, even if they work full time. They are less likely to be married and less likely to have a decent home and a decent school for their kids. Their chances of ending up in prison -- especially for the African-American and Latino boys -- are much higher.

Draw what conclusions you want from this, but it is happening. I tried making a difference for a while and may again before I'm through, but life was much more stressful and frustrating in those circumstances and I decided to try something else before I burned out. Unlike many, I had that option.