This Is What Poverty Looks Like
By Dawn Meehan, for Babble.com
Photo courtesy of: Thinkstock
I recently read an article by Babble blogger Alice Gomstyn about Sonya Romero-Smith, a kindergarten teacher in Albuquerque who helps her students that are living in poverty. The first questions she asks them each morning are: “Did you eat?” and “Are you clean?” It shocked a lot of people — but not me.
I happen to be one of those educators, working in a title 1 middle school in a very high-poverty area. When I say “poverty” here, I’m not talking about a family whose dad has been laid off from his job or a family going through divorce or sickness. I’m not talking about a sudden, temporary, or even long-term shortage of money. I’m talking about families who have lived in poverty for generations. Families who don’t know anything but poverty. Generational poverty is very different from families experiencing hard times — mainly because they often view education as a stressor, and school a place they do not belong, making it extremely difficult to end the cycle.
The poverty my students face affects every aspect of their lives, and helping these kids can be very challenging. Not only do we teach them, but we oftentimes find ourselves trying to meet their basic needs that aren’t being met at home. What makes it even more difficult is that the kids who need love the most ask for it in the most unloving of ways. That’s a saying that several of us have on our desks. We email it to each other as encouragement on tough days. It’s challenging to care for someone who is defiant and disruptive. It’s a challenge to remember the struggles our students face every day and keep that in mind when they’re fighting in class. However, it’s a challenge that most of us eagerly accept because we know that we can make a difference. We do have the power to change lives.
Whenever helicopters fly above my school, I instinctively tense. On the third day of school this year, we were informed of a dangerous situation a couple blocks away. An armed man was barricaded in a house and the area was surrounded by a S.W.A.T team. The principal immediately put the school on lock-down, and we remained there until 5:30 that evening. The following week, we had to hold a bus at the end of the day because another hostage situation with an armed perpetrator was taking place in the apartments by the bus stop. Every week you hear of another crime in this neighborhood — the neighborhood in which our students live. This is what they walk past every day. This is what they go home to.
Every single kid in my school gets free breakfast and lunch. We make every student go through the breakfast line and take a tray of food. Those kids who don’t want to eat put their trays on a designated table and we collect that food because there are always, always kids who are hungry throughout the day and that way we have something we can give them. I stand in the cafeteria every morning and monitor the kids during breakfast. Not a day has gone by when there haven’t been kids who go to that table to take seconds and thirds. I’m talking about kids who didn’t have dinner last night. I’m talking about kids who barely ate over the weekend. When we have leftover cartons of milk, we deliver them to the homeless shelter where some of our students live.
At the beginning of the year, I used to say things to my students like, “At least it’s Friday, right? You’ve got to love the weekend! Do you have any plans?” I said this until one too many students told me, “I’d rather be at school.” I was incredulous at first. What kid would rather be at school instead of at home on the weekend? And then I learned. A kid who doesn’t eat over the weekend. A kid whose dad is back in jail. A kid whose mom will spend the days off somewhere leaving that student to care for his four younger siblings with no food or diapers in the house. A kid whose mom’s drugged-up boyfriend will yell and hit. My students don’t look forward to days off school, they dread them.
I have students that stay at my school for only a month or two and then they’re gone. We have a mobility rate of 40%. That means that nearly half the kids who start the school year with us won’t finish it. Parents may only be able to come up with a deposit and one month’s rent. When that runs out, they move in with relatives, or into a hotel room, or a homeless shelter. I had a kid a couple years ago who was living in a car with his dad who had taken him away from his mom. I’ve had kids who were living in a hotel, sharing a bed with four other kids, or in foster care because their mom was taken to jail. Students living in poverty oftentimes have little to no stability at home.
There was a boy who wore the same shirt to school every single day for a week. The stain that was there on Monday was still there on Friday. He smelled awful by the end of the week. We have a classroom dedicated to housing the donations we’ve collected. We pass out not only notebooks and pencils, but deodorant, toothbrushes, clothes, coats, and backpacks to our students, but the demand is always greater than the supply. We even have a washer and dryer on campus to wash the donated items or to wash a student’s clothing. The person responsible for taking in donations and making sure the neediest kids get supplies told me, “A young lady came to me today for a backpack. I asked her if she needed supplies. She did, so I loaded her up with everything I had. When she reported to her next class, she walked in, sat down, pulled out her things, and went to work. Her teacher said that was a first. She is one who spends a lot of time in In-School Suspension.”
Earlier this year, a student complained of tooth pain. He ended up having an abscessed tooth. We alerted his mother, but it was weeks before she got him into the free clinic. By then his face was extremely swollen because of the infection. I’ve had an abscessed tooth before. The pain is worse than childbirth if you ask me. If I’d had to wait weeks with that kind of pain, I would have completely lost my mind. This student got arrested during this time. I’m not saying the arrest was due to the infected tooth, or that it wouldn’t have happened otherwise, but no one should have to suffer through pain like that for weeks on end.
I always had to tell one student to pull down his pants. Yes, I meant to write pull down his pants. Oh believe me, I tell boys to pull up their pants every single day. But this one student would wear joggers and the elastic around the cuff would ride up his leg, revealing his home arrest ankle monitor. I had to remind him to pull his pants down over it. He had stolen a car. He and several of his friends were in a gang. He was in middle school.
A couple of years ago, a student had to be transported from school to the hospital via an ambulance. His parents didn’t get to the hospital for seven hours because they had no transportation. For seven hours this student was sick and alone without his family there.
We dropped off a bag full of cartons of milk collected from breakfast to the needy family of a student. When we got to the house, we saw there were no doors or windows on the house, just wide-open rectangles. The amount of junk and filth in the house was enough to make you cry. People were sitting around, among the debris, with little babies.
Another teacher at this school told me such a sad, yet common in situations of generational poverty, story, “A student told me he couldn’t go to college because it would be disrespectful to his family. He would be trying to be better than them … and that is considered disrespectful.” Another teacher agreed, “I had a student at a nearby high school who earned a free ride to college. A free ride! And he turned it down because his family didn’t want him to go.” It’s so hard to wrap our brains around this attitude since we know that education is the key to breaking the cycle, but sadly this attitude is all too common in generational poverty.
When you read that more than half of U.S. Public School students are living in poverty, you think that these kids just don’t have a lot of money. But it goes so far beyond a lack of money. The effects are remarkably pervasive, creeping into every area of a student’s life. It’s hard to learn when basic needs aren’t being met. And it’s hard to care for a child who acts out, swears more than Eminem, disrupts your class, tells you off, and starts fights. The educators who take the time to talk to, listen to, sympathize with, and understand their students’ situations are the ones who make a difference. The ones who remember that the kids who need love the most will ask for it in the most unloving of ways, change lives.
MORE ON BABBLE:
The first question this teacher asks her kindergarteners each morning is heartbreaking
What I learned after taking a homeless mother grocery shopping
Let’s stop viewing the 16 million children on food stamps as a failure
Almost homeless: My family’s journey through financial hell and back
When I see homeless families in crisis, I can’t just walk on by
