Reading my friend Eric Johnson's recent piece in The N&O - The morality of giving our kids an edge - in the wake of the college admissions scandal made me realize I never found a column I wrote in 2009. After this column ran, I actually had people accuse me of child abuse for choosing to put my children in a high-needs school.
By Burgetta Eplin Wheeler
January 9, 2009
Publication: News & Observer, The (Raleigh, NC)
Page: A13
Word Count: 866
Any parent who has had a child schooled in a Wake County
classroom in which more than 40 percent of the children were poor does not need
a study to prove that efforts to keep the schools socioeconomically diverse are
worth the costs.
Any parent who has lost a child to a random murder, any taxpayer
who tires of building prisons or any human being with a heart for those trapped
by their own upbringings does not need a study to prove that diversity efforts
are worth the costs.
Anybody who doesn't see the connection between those two
paragraphs is willfully ignoring reality. Poverty is often severely limiting
and destructive, and creating schools where the majority of the students face
such an obstacle would have immeasurable costs to the society in which the
children of those strenuously advocating “neighborhood schools” will have to
live one day.
HAUNTING ME STILL IS A CHILD with whom I used to read at a
downtown Raleigh elementary school, a school that was nearly 60 percent poor by
the time my second child finished there. Each week, this shy 6-year-old would
eagerly approach the reading program prize box and finger the erasers and the
fuzzy pencils and the trinkets, but she always -- always -- snatched the
crackers and ran. She was hungry. Every week.
And the stories that child could tell: of a grandmother arrested
in the middle of the night, of an aunt and uncle who took her in and had food
enough only for their own children, of sleeping on the floor.
Yes, let's take this child and her crushing needs and put her
and a dozen other children living similar lives in one classroom with other
at-risk children.
Or let’s take the four children in my daughter's kindergarten
class in 1997 who required hourly behavioral reports. Not weekly, as the other
children received. Hourly. Did I listen? Was I respectful? Did I keep my hands
and feet to myself?
Let’s take those four children and others like them and other
less troubled but at-risk children and fill up a school.
Or let’s take the most heartbreaking of those four children, a
5-year-old I saw punch another child in the head like a top-notch prize
fighter, and add the kindergartners who have never seen “Goodnight Moon” or any
other book, the second-graders who use obscenities, the fourth-graders who talk
of oral sex and the pregnant fifth-grader and put them with other at-risk
children and fill up a school.
And then let’s pretend as if spending more money on that school
will make it every bit as good as an Apex school that is 1 percent low-income.
