The multitude of barriers, created by poverty, to achieving an rigorous education must be overcome in order to have equity in schools.

Many years ago, I was principal of a very large elementary school in a midwestern city.  It was the only non-housing structure in the neighborhood. There were no other services in that neighborhood: no grocery store, no gas station, no public transportation, no anything.  The lessons I learned about educating all students to the highest levels at that school still influence my work today.  I learned that equity in education means doing whatever it takes to ensure each child masters rigorous standards and more.

 As we struggled to ensure our students mastered the rigorous standards, we found ourselves grappling with all sorts of poverty: food insecurity, lack of health care, untreated mental health issues, substandard housing, very limited transportation, substandard employment due to lack of education, high amounts of neighborhooed crime, and lack of before and after school care and safe activities for children and youth.  These and many more poverty issues caused our students to frequently miss school or often come to school unprepared to learn because they were distracted by trauma, hunger, health issues, and so on. 

The schoolhouse was the one place where everybody in the community could come together.  Their children came there almost daily, especially after we extended the school year by another six weeks.  We were fortunate the school was in a fairly large building and air conditioned; a rarity in that city at the time. We began by reaching out to our families to establish relationships. Each of our families received multiple home visits from teachers and other staff each year (or porch conversations) where the emphasis was sharing the good news about their children. We went to them before we expected them to come to us.

 Then we started inviting families to school for evening programing. We would start with a hearty dinner that was open to everyone in the neighborhood. We served hundreds of people at every dinner we held. We had activities for the children or the students would perform for their parents, but we also had English classes, adult education classes, parenting workshops, or just timeto socialize with your neighbors. We also had Friday morning coffee service at the front school door. It was a big hit and a wonderful socialization time. We would also frequently have representatives from the local health department, the local housing authority, WIC, and other social services at the school to share with parents the services they provided.

When we realized how receptive our families to the various social services, we started inviting these social service organizations to come use space in the schoolhouse to provide services to our families on a daily or weekly basis.  This eliminated the frequent barrier of lack of transportation to receive these services. The families could get the services while dropping off or picking up their children. We installed washers and dryers at school for families to use and had vacuum cleaners that families would check out to use at their home. We had a county health clinic, a program for senior citizens (They worked as foster grandparents helping students half the day, had lunch together, and then engaged in their own activities.), family mental health services, recreational programs after school, a library that provide materials for both students and adults and computer/internet access, clothing and food pantries, and a Women, Infants, and Children Program.  Students needing mental health services never missed appointment as it was just a few steps down the hallway.

When I was a beginning educator, if you had proposed such a school undertaking that involved providing free rent/space to other social services in the school and convincing the district to invest additional dollars to pay staff and utility bills to keep the school open for longer days and year around, I would have told you that our job as educators was to teach the students not raise the students. My priveledge was blinding me.

However, from the very beginning of my career until now, I have strongly believed that as educators it is our responsibility at a minimum to ensure every student in our care achieves the rigorous standards set by the state.  As each school year went by, a multitude of instructional strategies and intensive planning and preparation were used in classrooms to try to ensure every student achieved at high levels.  With these intense efforts, we did educate the many of our students to meet at least the standards. Still every year there were students, who despite excellent instruction had incredible barriers that were keeping them from learning. We could no longer ignore those barriers if we truly intended to educate every child.

I am not much good in helping with health issues. I am not a nurse or a physician’s assistant. However, there are nurses, PA’s and doctors that are working hard to bridge this poverty gap for families. If I could make it easier for health professionals and my students’ families to connect, I could help remove that poverty barrier to my students’ learning. We reached out and invited in multiple organization to serve our families. We added an additional social worker to help coordinate all the partnerships. 

We started out as the lowest performing elementary school among over 50 elementary schools in our urban district and one of the lowest performing in the state. Five years later, over 95% of our students were meeting and exceeding the literacy and math standards. It was due to the incredibly hard working and talented teachers, parents that learned to trust us, and partner organizations that worked hand in hand with the school. We all believed in the innate ability of our children and were relentless about removing any barriers in their way.

Matthew Desmond in his Poverty By America states: “Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing—and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world” (p.23).

If we as educators believe in equity, if we believe that all children can learn to the highest levels regardless of zip code, then we must partner with our community and its social service organizations to remover the barriers poverty creates to every child being highly educated. Together we can do this.

References:

Desmonda, M. (2003). Poverty by America. Crown New York.

This blog is written by Dr. GwenCarol Holmes, a long-time educator and passionate advocate for all students mastering rigorous standards.