It isn’t that Ally doesn’t want to go to school. She does.
Because she’s part of a homeless family, she faces a few extra challenges, like
staying in one place long enough to really benefit from the learning sequence
in any one school. Or, to gain a few friends along the way somewhere. Now a
veteran of disrupted school and social surroundings at age eight, Ally has
learned to adapt to everything from hunger to sleeping in the minivan for weeks
in a row to the weird looks and comments she gets when she goes to a new school
because of the things she doesn’t have.
It has been a long, wild and weird summer in Colorado. But
Ally and thousands of homeless students in Colorado (along with thousands more
students in El Paso County alone who have housing but live in poverty) are
about to face something almost too mundane for the present Colorado context: the
cycle of another school year. Indeed, among the many thousands of public school
students in Colorado, by 2010 over 18,000 were homeless. That’s over a 50%
increase from just four years before.[i]
That stinks. It stinks because homeless kids tend to be
transient. And because their education process is so often disrupted, homeless
kids are nine times more likely to repeat a grade, four times more likely to
drop out of school, and three times more likely to be placed in special
education programs than their peers who have housing.[ii]
Imagine for a moment how tough it can be for a homeless
child to be considered a “regular student” just from the challenges of
enrollment. Residency requirements -- does it really matter in which school
district is the WalMart that let you park and sleep there overnight during June?
Guardianship requirements? Delays in transfer of school records, if the child
was at the last school long enough to even have meaningful records?
Transportation insecurity? How about proof of immunizations?
It takes great determination and, almost always, a lot of
extra effort for a homeless family to even enroll their children in school. The
same goes for many families who live one paycheck or less away from economic
collapse. But make no mistake, school is worth the effort for these families
and their children. Education is still a pathway out of poverty. And while they’re
going to school, students in poverty are fed there once or twice a day on
school days. That makes a huge difference for them and their families.
And there’s something simple you and I can do to help: give
the gift of school supplies so we can send our younger neighbors in need off to
a new year of school with the classroom supplies they need. This week, visit
Springs Rescue Mission at 5 West Las Vegas Street (or to your local mission wherever you are) to drop off a solid color
backpack loaded with school supplies: notebooks, pens, pencils, Kleenex, hand
sanitizer, blunt-tip scissors, pocket folders, watercolors and crayons for
younger students, calculators for older students. Maybe you could fill up a
backpack for a student the same age as your child. And if you can’t fill a backpack this year,
just drop off the supplies you can.
You can stop by during business hours
Monday - Friday anytime, any week, or come join us Friday, July 27th
from 8:30 am - 4:30 pm for a special School Supply Drive. Some of our local partners
have provided light refreshments for that day, and KVOR’s Richard Randall will
join us from 11 am - 1 pm if you can make it over the lunch hour.
Our goal is to collect enough school supplies this Friday alone
to fill 500 or more backpacks, plain and simple. That number will greatly supplement
the normal flow of school supply donations and help us meet the need of a
growing number of kids, like Ally, who need adequate supplies for a new school
year.
One last thing: Don’t ever think your school supplies donation of any size
is insignificant.
- At the very least, you’re lessening the financial pressure on families that might otherwise have to choose between paying for rent and paying for crayons.
- And you’re providing special encouragement for homeless and at-risk kids to attend school as you remove peer pressure about new stuff or the lack of it.
- In turn, as noted earlier, attending school also gives these students access to school feeding programs.
Now, about those new crayons…
[i][i]
Colorado Department of Education, Homeless Education, http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeprevention/homeless_index.htm.
[ii]
Institute for Children and Poverty, 2008. “National Data on Family Homelessness.”
Retrieved from http://www.icpny.org/PDF/reports/AccesstoSuccess.pdf?Submit1=Free+Download.
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