One Small Voice: Education crisis affects food bank

by Lynn Mandaville

I was awakened this Sunday morning very early by the sounds of someone fidgeting around at our front door. I didn’t think much of it, because in this neighborhood (and probably in every subdivision in Chandler AZ), it is common for realtors and those providing lawn and cleaning services to leave their propaganda in our screen doors to drum up business.

But this morning, what was left for us was a brown grocery bag tagged with information for the Midwest Food Bank of Arizona.  

In the two years we’ve been here, we’ve not seen any solicitations for food.

But we’re going through a particularly interesting time in the Phoenix area right now. #RedforEd is the prevalent issue for us now. Tens of thousands of teachers, school support staff, and their families have been marching on the state capitol. Dozens upon dozens of vehicles sport RedforEd signs, painted windows, and pennants.

The library where I volunteer has been short-staffed because non-education related parents are without child care now that schools are closed for the walkout. And locals are posting photos on Facebook of local groups assembling to fill box lunches for children who rely on being in school to receive their low-cost or free meals before and during school days. These kids will go hungry otherwise.

Though I already know how important schooling is, and how widespread its influence is in the lives of young children, this grocery bag reminded me of the ripple effect created when teachers begin to become activists over not only their inadequate salaries, but also the wages of support staff, and inadequate money for classroom supplies, textbooks and building maintenance.

The United States of America has made public education the dumping ground, uh, I mean the responsible entity, to monitor and put band-aids on a multitude of social ills.

I remember a time when schools prepared students either for college or for “the trades.” We had guidance counselors who helped us determine our paths. Then we had extracurricular activities for those who were interested in sports (primarily for boys in the pre-Title IX days), music, language clubs, or the school newspaper and yearbook.

We had a school nurse, but had no school psychologists, or security details.  We had one or two classrooms designated for (PLEASE forgive the old terminology) the so-called retarded kids. There were no reduced price lunches. Breakfasts were not served in school. If you weren’t involved in extracurriculars, or you were in elementary school, there were no after-school care programs for latch-key kids. I don’t think society even recognized that there were households where a mom wasn’t home all day waiting for the kids to come back.

But during the 50 years since I graduated from public school, our school taxes have had to cover the basics (teachers, administrators, and all support staff from cafeteria and playground workers, to custodians and building maintenance), and a giant boatload of peripheral services no one ever foresaw in the 1950s and ’60s, without a commensurate increase in funding.

Here is a list, certainly incomplete, of new “educational” programs. It will give you and idea, if you haven’t been paying attention, of that for which we have made educators responsible:

1.  School psycholigists, trained to help kids cope with divorce, domestic violence, poverty, suicide, sexual assault and more.

2.  School security, now often armed, to insure an environment safe from weapons, gangs, and intruders.

3.  Expanded programs for children with learning and developmental challenges.(These needs were horribly ignored for decades, and were, finally, rightfully addressed by legislation for full inclusion in public education.  These programs were long overdue, and legitimately demanded and granted for the kids who needed them, but were also horribly non-funded or underfunded when they were finally established.)

4.  Meal programs for children in poverty. Too may kids were coming to school unprepared to learn due to hunger. Low cost and free meals were created. Along with them came the additional bookkeeping, record-keeping, forms and formalities and bureaucratic red tape to implement and sustain.

5.  Head Start and similar programs to insure that kids came to kindergarten prepared for the learning environment.

Those in the educational industry can fill in the blanks I’ve left.  

And if all this isn’t enough to make young people cross off “teacher” from their lists of what they want to be when they “grow up,” it has been suggested that teachers now become armed guards for entire, overcrowded classrooms full of other people’s children.

Over too many years Americans have been willing to allow the education of future generations to decline in importance as to where their hard-earned money goes. Americans have been selfish, and recklessly short-sighted in understanding how a great education can be a preventative measure against poverty, hunger, low self-esteem and social adjustment among students, and the marginalization of entire socio-economic and ethnic groups.

The adults who work in the classrooms, cafeterias, buses and buildings understand this. They innately know how a clean, well-maintained facility (in which the heat and AC work, and the walls and ceilings are intact) can contribute to an environment where classes with an optimum teacher/student ratio result in equitably educated children, where a teacher can reasonably observe issues within, between and among students that might require special intervention by an associated professional, perhaps even heading off a future catastrophic shooting.

It’s my opinion that our current situation may be too far gone to remedy merely by raising teacher salaries. There are others who share that thought.  Among them are the Arizona teachers, et. al., who are demanding increased funding for the bricks and mortar hardware and software of education — textbooks, classroom supplies and well-kept buildings.

But that doesn’t mean we should not start putting our money where our children are, IN SCHOOLS across the nation.

As time goes on, if we throw money at public education, I believe many of our other social problems will decrease in proportion to the increased efforts to vastly improve the total environment into which we commend our kids five days a week for most of the calendar year.

But back to the brown grocery bag we found in our front door this morning.

Local food banks are experiencing food shortages, now that schools are closed and children are not being fed within school walls. Families now have to find the time and finances to shop and cook extra meals that have not fallen within their daily schedules or means. So families are turning to their local food banks to take up the slack.

Other routine aspects of society are affected by this justified walkout. There is not enough child care to go around to attend to the all the kids whose parents have to go to work every day. I suspect that some businesses are seeing a dropoff in patronage because those parents fortunate not to have to go to work are now staying home with their kids instead of going to the gym or the salon, or out for coffee, or off on a shopping trip.

I’m sure there are a dozen other aspects I haven’t even begun to imagine.

So this morning we went out and filled our brown grocery sack with individual serving size, healthy fruit products and placed it by the front door for collection by the food bank volunteers next week.

We did it willingly, to support the greater good, the greater big scheme of things that teachers and other educational support angels provide to the promise of the future.

You know the future I’m talking about. The future where everyone can and does read, can and does think critically, where the most basic moral and ethical tenets of American society flourish and grow as an example to the world at large, that human beings can aspire to and achieve anything good they set their minds to, if only they recognize and finance the thing that truly matters. Education.