Left Behind

The other evening, as I was getting supper on the table and thinking about the yard work I must get done this weekend, I heard an NPR story that made me stop in my tracks. It was a story about schools and the ways they try to help homeless students that attend them.

I'll write that again: homeless children just trying to get to school. When I think of homeless people, I usually think of veterans; the mentally ill; truly troubled people. But I picture adults. That doesn't make it okay, of course, but somehow the idea of homeless children trying to attend school is so much worse.

We can talk about test scores, and reading readiness, and No Child Left Behind all we like, but the real problems in American schools are not that simple. The real problems are hungry children from families with parents who are struggling to get by. Children without clean clothes and lunch boxes; with no place to do their homework at night; with anxieties and fears that no child should ever have to live with. Homeless children. The very phrase makes you catch your breath. How could this happen in our country?

In this nation, with our prosperity and accomplishments, it should be unthinkable that we have homeless people, let alone homeless children. How in the world can we educate children to succeed in this word if we can't find them a bed to sleep in or a steady source of nutrition to get their brains ready to learn?

This weekend, the cleaning, the laundry and the yard work are going to seem a whole lot easier to get done. And those beds that need to be made and the lunch boxes that must be filled? Well, those are a blessing as well, because I have them to take care of.

We must do better as a nation.