Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, January 16, 2008: Poverty is seen and heard in the classroom
Eugene Kane
Little stomachs grumbling.
That’s what a Milwaukee schoolteacher once told me was the hardest part of working in a school system with so many poor children.
Some mornings, she could hear the little stomachs grumbling. “It’s enough to break your heart,” was how she put it.
At the time, it surprised me. After all, many poor children in Milwaukee Public Schools qualify for free breakfast and lunch programs, don’t they?
But the reality of a school system where one out of every three school-age children live with a family in poverty – according to U.S. Census figures released last week – is that many students fall through the cracks.
Some kids simply never get breakfast because their school bus doesn’t get to the building in time. Other places, some kids are finicky eaters who never learned the importance of a good breakfast, so they go hungry. Another heartbreaking reality is many poor children are raised in households with one struggling parent where feeding children a hearty breakfast isn’t a priority.
Wearing shabby clothing is another part of being a poor student.
When a student wears shabby clothing, or out-of-date clothing or ill-fitting clothing picked straight from the Goodwill bin, other kids notice. When poor children show up for class in shabby clothing, they are often made the butt of jokes from classmates. Even as young as elementary school, there is a fashion competition among students where kids tease the ones who don’t have the latest sneakers or outfits.
It doesn’t even matter if most of the kids are poor and can’t afford new clothing. Someone always becomes the brunt of the joke.
Another teacher at a Milwaukee middle school once told me the introduction of a uniform dress code was the best thing to happen for some of her students. They no longer had to worry about being teased about their clothes because everyone wore the same thing.
She said some kids were so self-conscious about their clothing, sometimes they even stayed home.
Many times, poor kids from houses where the heat and lights are turned off consider school a sanctuary from their home life. When the school day ends and they have to go back home, it almost seems like punishment.
Poor children have toothaches, infections, bruises, chronic ailments and other health problems that can go unaddressed far too long. Poor children don’t have lots of books to read at home, but they do have television, which shows them a world filled with the kind of things they can’t have.
Poor children seldom see many successful people in their neighborhood other than the ones who sell drugs or intimidate their neighbors. Many poor children have seen violence up-close and personal, but they don’t have counselors or psychiatrists they can talk to, to make sense out of it all.
One out of every three school-age kids in Milwaukee comes from a poor family, which means they face the kind of hardship that you can understand only if you are unfortunate enough to be born to parents with no money. It’s not their fault, but poverty can scar these children in profound ways.
Many of our greatest Americans were poor children once; I think their stories need to be told to today’s poor kids so they realize poverty does not have to define them for the rest of their lives.
As long as they can ignore the grumbling in their stomachs and as long as the rest of us don’t give up on them.