I'm A Little Angry With Philly

I see about 300 kids per week in two separate elementary school libraries. The kids I see cherish the tattered donation books covered in doodles with torn pages, missing covers, and broken spines. Some of the teachers brought in ziploc bags and wrote students' names on them as a preservation technique for the week the students are allowed to keep them in their desks, to read when they have free time during the school day. My students wear uniforms, a solid color shirt (color determined by the school) and plain blue or tan pants. Sitting with a 6-year-old wearing a tattered thin cotton short-sleeved yellow shirt turned almost black with dirt and grime, giving rapt attention during an Arctic Vortex while you read a story about a little girl who teaches manners to bullies is being a witness to injustice. My 300 kids are members of a larger student body, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, who are systematically getting left behind.

In the beginning of September, I felt sad about these sweet little kids with no classroom helpers, no science labs and not enough books, paper, pencils, crayons, scissors, glue sticks and markers to go around. When a student misbehaves, it's a very long line to see the one or two administrators who struggle to oversee the entire K-8 school. Errant kids just run around the cold grimy hallways at their leisure because there's nobody to round them up. On my first day, a 4th grader was getting handcuffed as I walked out after my shift. The only message many people would hear if they read this is "who are the parents?" and then images of food stamps, drugs, ghettos and joblessness would overtake the conversation. Sins of the father, I guess. How unfortunate that some of our littlest learners get totally fucked because of their parents. I don't think there's a blanket federal program to put in place to solve this problem, but we have a cultural problem that's letting the greater consciousness turn a blind eye to this bullshit. I think the important thing to remember is that these kids are really little. I don't have a solution or a prescription, it's just upsetting and I wanted to vent.