Jan. 9, 2009: The price of packing schools with poverty

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.

Wake school board member Ron Margiotta wants the school system to study whether its diversity goals are scientifically worthwhile, but how can a study be done without a 95 percent-poverty school as a comparison?

Maybe we could learn something here from the fact that the charter is about to be yanked from yet another high-poverty school in Wake County.

Margiotta contends that the parental involvement a high-poverty neighborhood school would gain would offset any problems. “I’m not saying that you take low-income students and just lock them in a school without resources,” Margiotta says. “You provide them extra money.”

 Lord have mercy. If Margiotta wants to study something, perhaps he should study how involved low-income parents are in the neighborhood schools their children already attend. Many of these parents are working two jobs just to survive or are themselves caught up in a generations-long cycle of low appreciation for education.

Or perhaps Margiotta could study the links between poverty and crime or the number of prisoners who do not have high school diplomas.

AND THIS MIRACLE-WORKING MONEY of which he speaks? I recently ran into a lovely woman who taught kindergarten at the elementary school my children attended. She teaches at a school in North Raleigh now and seemed embarrassed to confide that she had never understood the depth of her mental and physical exhaustion until she began teaching at a school where she didn't have to spend her day dealing with the extreme behaviors and needs of too many 5-year-olds already world-wise and weary.

How much money would it take to create high-poverty schools where teachers aren't exhausted in every fiber of their beings? Where little people aren’t starving in body and soul? Where a love of learning can be made to supplant a basic instinct just to survive?

There is no easy way to balance all of the needs of all of Wake’s schoolchildren, but intentionally creating high-poverty schools would be its own crime.

Clearly, there are scores of disadvantaged children who are tremendous students and delights to teachers. Forcing them to attend school in high-poverty clusters would lower their chances of beating the odds.

It’s not the sitting next to affluent kids that helps so much; it's the not sitting in a room full of kids facing as many if not more obstacles than you.

Individually, we understandably want what we think is best for our own children. But part of what’s best for all of us is teaching children how to think beyond themselves and trying to offer them a world in which fewer people are ravaged by the destructive powers of poverty.