My mom cried as a first year teacher when she realized many of her students were food insecure. She put a snack pantry in her class and has had one ever since.
My sister cried with anger as a first year teacher because of how few of her students grew up without being exposed to violence, poverty, and neglect.
My dad didn’t cry as a first year teacher, but was convinced he was the worst teacher ever for 4 years straight. (He wasn’t)
My aunt was exhausted for the first year because her students were convinced she’d only be at their school for one year and then move to a better paying school district like all of their other new teachers. She spent the entire time teaching, actively gaining trust, and calming anxieties.
Some of these things are not technically school related, but have an impact on students in the classroom. As new teachers, my relatives got varying levels of support. New teachers need better support.
3 quit at my old job because they didn’t feel like they were getting the pay or support that was appropriate for what they were doing in the classroom. All of the teachers I have encountered pay for many of their own supplies. Many take time before or after school to check up on students they feel are at risk.
There are teachers that have students live with them or end up fostering students. My mom fostered 2 students and had another 2 live with us.
What many teachers do on the job isn’t as supported as it could be. They aren’t paid like they should.
Did I mention that a lot of the first year teachers I have worked with qualify for SNAP benefits and/or WIC? 😦
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Re: Why Teachers Provide Snacks (at my work)
ALL of the teachers I work with at my school provide snacks to students.
We’re a Title I school. This means almost all of our students are food insecure. It’s unreasonable to expect food insecure families to provide their own snacks to school.
ALL of the teachers and many of our other staff members provide snacks for their classrooms or offices. Our counselor has snacks in her office. Our health room assistant has snacks in her office. Our principal has snacks in his office. Our vice principal has snacks in her office. The office professionals have small snacks available as well.
Our new teachers usually can’t afford to do this, so veteran teachers and support staff often chip in.
When students DON’T have access to snacks, they get tired. Our students can’t focus. Students get irritable. They’re feeling the effects of hunger and cannot focus on their work. We see escalated behaviors because kids are hungry.
Providing food not only prevents some problems from happening, but it’s The Right Thing To Do.
Many of our students’ Only Guaranteed Meals are at school. School meals are not designed to provide a child’s only source of nutrition. The caloric value of school lunches isn’t enough. So—Kids get snacks with lunch. Kids get multiple ‘breaks’ (which they think are ‘‘regular breaks’‘) for snacks.
Anyone who wants a small snack will get one.
We have a Friday Weekend Bag Program, but many families HATE THOSE. Those snack bags come from the Thurston County Food Bank. They only contain shelf stable food since many of our families don’t have a reliable way to cook things. Most of the families decline the bags because the Instant Noodles, Dry Granola Bars, and Vegetable Soup aren’t what they’d eat anyway.
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A lot of the kids DO want fruit/vegetables. (Downside is if they can’t store those at home). We have some kids who try to hoard milk. <—a problem since many kids don’t have access to reliable refrigeration at home! Our milk ‘‘collecting’‘ kids ALL don’t have reliable refrigeration since they’re in living situations that don’t have refrigerators or freezers.
We provide snacks for the kids because we need to.
My Personal Project this coming school year is connecting My School with local nonprofit Fairshare Food Share Resource. It’s a group of volunteers who harvest small amounts of fruit and vegetables and give them away. They’re for smaller home gardeners who aren’t up for sending items directly to our food bank system due to time/health issues/etc.
The Thurston County Food Bank is expanding our school garden this year. I’m hoping that the garden will eventually be a nice Community You Pick for our students and the surrounding neighborhood.
The last big ol’ update had links. I’ll add links to this because food insecurity TICKS ME OFF. It shouldn’t be a thing. We’re fightingfood insecurity at my elementary school.
“Schools have always been the front line in the battle against
childhood hunger. It started with the National School Lunch Act, signed
by President Truman in 1946, which gave federal money to states to fund
school lunches.
Today more than 30 million kids benefit. And yet,
by some estimates at least one in six still doesn’t know where the next
meal is coming from.
“School
lunch is no longer this Brady Bunch convenience; it is a soup kitchen,”
said Jennifer Ramo, of the New Mexico anti-poverty group Appleseed.
“It
is a place where kids who haven’t eaten at night or haven’t eaten that
weekend, go to get basic nutrition so they can function. I think
we just have no idea how big the problem is and how many children are
suffering. And the best thing to do is just must make sure they’re fed.”
“What do parents tell their kids on the first day of school – stay
out of trouble, do your homework, and listen to your teachers,” Nelson
said.
“That’s our message today: listen to your teachers. What are they
telling us? Hunger needs to be a national priority.”
One in five children struggle with hunger nationwide and six out of
ten teachers report students regularly coming to school hungry. According to 80 percent of those teachers, the problem is only getting worse.
Educators realize the toll hunger takes on students. Nine in ten
teachers consider breakfast to be “extremely important” to academic
achievement. Fifty-three percent of teachers spend an average $26 of
their own money each month providing snacks for their students.”
“There
is tremendous stigma of children going into a cafeteria before the
bell,” said McAuliffe, “whereas with the alternative breakfast model, it
normalizes it, creates community in the classroom around a meal, and
starts the day off strong.”
Underscoring the crucial impact a
healthy breakfast can have, a 2013 study done by Deloitte for No Kid
Hungry found that kids who have regular access to breakfast score 17.5
percent higher on standardized math tests
.Breakfast and lunch
programs in schools are making great strides in attacking childhood
hunger, but a huge gap remains. According to No Kid Hungry, a quarter of
all low-income parents worry their kids don’t have enough to eat
between school lunch and breakfast the next day; and three out of four
public school teachers say students regularly come to school hungry.
Increasingly, advocates are focusing on programs that ensure kids have
enough to eat when they are not in school, and after school and summer
meal programs are on the rise.”
Yep. My school is poor enough that it has all the kids on free breakfast and lunch, and nearly every teacher has a box of protein bars or fruit snacks or something to give to hungry kids in their classroom. We all buy them with our own money. How fucked are we as a society that this is pretty much normal at all the poorer schools?
A lot of our school funding is through property taxes. Low income areas have lower taxes which means lower funding for their neighborhood schools. It sucks.
Schools in high poverty areas are Title I schools. Almost every school in my district is Title I.
ALL public schools should be properly funded and NO ONE should be food insecure. (my 2 cents)
And guys, you know… It doesn’t have to be like this. Teachers like me who teach in other countries know this and are always so shocked when we read about and see what the US, supposedly a leading and not a developing country, is like in education
I always keep our extra snacks from our programs (usually the ones I did not eat or that other children did not open) just in case. I will never forget the four year old girl my third year in this program who would sneak food or her older siblings in third and fifth grade so they also had something to eat, since they gave so much of their portions to her and her little sister.
It was just after 10 p.m. on an overcast September night in Los Angeles, and L. was tired from a long day of class prep, teaching, and grading papers. So the 57-year-old anthropology professor fed her Chihuahua-dachshund mix a freeze-dried chicken strip, swapped her cigarette trousers for stretchy black yoga pants, and began to unfold a set of white sheets and a beige cotton blanket to make up her bed.
But first she had to recline the passenger seat of her 2015 Nissan Leaf as far as it would go—that being her bed in the parking lot she’d called home for almost three months. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was playing on her iPad as she drifted off for another night. “Like sleeping on an airplane—but not in first class,” she said. That was in part by design. “I don’t want to get more comfortable. I want to get out of here.”
L., who asked to go by her middle initial for fear of losing her job, couldn’t afford her apartment earlier this year after failing to cobble together enough teaching assignments at two community colleges. By July she’d exhausted her savings and turned to a local nonprofit called Safe Parking L.A., which outfits a handful of lots around the city with security guards, port-a-potties, Wi-Fi, and solar-powered electrical chargers. Sleeping in her car would allow her to save for a deposit on an apartment. On that night in late September, under basketball hoops owned by an Episcopal church in Koreatown, she was one of 16 people in 12 vehicles. Ten of them were female, two were children, and half were employed.
The headline of the press release announcing the results of the county’s latest homeless census strikes a note of progress: “2018 Homeless Count Shows First Decrease in Four Years.” In some ways that’s true. The figure for people experiencing homelessness dropped 4 percent, a record number got placed in housing, and chronic and veteran homelessness fell by double digits. But troubling figures lurk. The homeless population is still high, at 52,765—up 47 percent from 2012. Those who’d become homeless for the first time jumped 16 percent from last year, to 9,322 people, and the county provided shelter for roughly 5,000 fewer people than in 2011.
All this in a year when the economy in L.A., as in the rest of California and the U.S., is booming. That’s part of the problem. Federal statistics show homelessness overall has been trending down over the past decade as the U.S. climbed back from the Great Recession, the stock market reached all-time highs, and unemployment sank to a generational low. Yet in many cities, homelessness has spiked.
It’s most stark and visible out West, where shortages of shelter beds force people to sleep in their vehicles or on the street. In Seattle, the number of “unsheltered” homeless counted on a single night in January jumped 15 percent this year from 2017—a period when the value of Amazon.com Inc., one of the city’s dominant employers, rose 68 percent, to $675 billion. In California, home to Apple, Facebook, and Google, some 134,000 people were homeless during the annual census for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in January last year, a 14 percent jump from 2016. About two-thirds of them were unsheltered, the highest rate in the nation.
At least 10 cities on the West Coast have declared states of emergency in recent years. San Diego and Tacoma, Wash., recently responded by erecting tents fit for disaster relief areas to provide shelter for their homeless. Seattle and Sacramento may be next.
“No one is in charge”
The reason the situation has gotten worse is simple enough to understand, even if it defies easy solution: A toxic combo of slow wage growth and skyrocketing rents has put housing out of reach for a greater number of people. According to Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored housing giant, the portion of rental units affordable to low earners plummeted 62 percentfrom 2010 to 2016.
Rising housing costs don’t predestine people to homelessness. But without the right interventions, the connection can become malignant. Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percentcorrelated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”
“Yet many people would like to pretend that the financial woes of millions of Americans are not systemic but, rather, their own fault, a side effect of their spendthrift, undisciplined ways. There’s been a long campaign to blame financial difficulties — especially millennials’ troubles — on everything from lattes, to avocado toast and iPhones. Others attempt to sound well-meaning and posit that it has to do with lack of financial literacy, as if there are millions of people out there who somehow don’t believe they need to save money or are ignorant about how to do so. Personal finance advice likes to pass itself off as service journalism, but when the advice is passed off as something anyone can do, with no serious attempt to grapple with how greater economic and sociological circumstances combine to render the advice offered useless to almost everyone, that “service” becomes as political as it gets. It’s blaming individual Americans for their failure to surmount a system in which the rich get richer and the rest of us fall behind. The attacks on Ocasio-Cortez’s finances fall into this category. If you can somehow prove she isn’t who she says she is financially, or that her financial woes are largely the result of her own behavior, you don’t need to take the economic concerns of millennials and other falling-behind Americans that fueled her political ascent seriously.”
I really struggled to find just one screenshot to encapsulate exactly how dumb this article is but
this does the trick. It truly is a clusterfuck.
This literally doesn’t mean anything. That’s word soup. What the fuck is that even SUPPOSED to mean?
“No doubt there were people with skills similar to those of the richest Americans today, and some became very well-to-do by early 19thcentury standards. But they didn’t become staggeringly rich simply because a lack of technology limited the ability of the ‘1 percenters’ of the early 19th to touch the U.S. (and the world) with their genius.”
Is this a joke? Are you sure tr*mp didn’t write this fuckery?
poor people on SNAP or other benefits do not need “healthy eating” rules imposed on them. restricting their food choices doesn’t make them healthier. when we limit what they can buy we limit their access to sufficient calories. “junk food” is dense with calories and provides efficient energy for the body. fruits and vegetables contribute little to meeting total energy needs and their nutritional content isn’t very beneficial when overall calorie intake is too low.
poor people don’t need food rules imposed from on high, they need ENOUGH food and they need regular access to it. i’m so done with these tepid takes (cc: pbs, npr and other liberal media) on getting poor people to eat “healthier” as though that were some kind of anti-oppressive stance… it’s not! are we willing to do what it takes to make all people food-secure, with regular access to enough food that they want and enjoy? that’s the only thing worth talking about
If nearly a decade interviewing the wealth managers for the 1% taught me anything, it is that the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor have a lot more in common than stereotypes might lead you to believe.
In conversation, wealth managers kept coming back to the flamboyant vices of their clients. It was quite unexpected, in the course of discussing tax avoidance, to hear professional service providers say things like:
“I’ve told my colleagues: ‘If I ever become like some of our clients, shoot me.’ Because they are really immoral people – too much time on their hands, and all the money means they have no limits. I was actually told by one client not to bring my wife on a trip to Monaco unless I wanted to see her get hit on by 10 guys. The local sport, he said, was picking up other men’s wives.”
The clients of this Geneva-based wealth manager also “believe that they are descended from the pharaohs, and that they were destined to inherit the earth”.
If a poor person voiced such beliefs, he or she might well be institutionalized; for those who work with the wealthy, however, such “eccentricities” are all in a day’s work. Indeed, an underappreciated irony of accelerating economic inequality has been the way it has exposed behaviors among the ultra-rich that mirror the supposed “pathologies” of the ultra-poor.
In fact, one of the London-based wealth managers I interviewed said that a willingness to accept with equanimity behavior that would be considered outrageous in others was an informal job requirement. Clients, he said, specifically chose wealth managers not just on technical competence, but on their ability to remain unscandalized by the private lives of the ultra-rich: “They [the clients] have to pick someone they want to know everything about them: about Mother’s lesbian affairs, Brother’s drug addiction, the spurned lovers bursting into the room.” Many of these clients are not employed and live off family largesse, but no one calls them lazy.
As Lane and Harburg put it in the libretto of the musical Finian’s Rainbow:
When a rich man doesn’t want to work
He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant
But when a poor man doesn’t want to work
He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger
He’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk
When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is – at most – a frisson of tabloid-level curiosity, followed by a collective shrug.
Behaviors indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but used as a justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance. Discussion of poverty has become almost impossible without moral outrage directed at lazy “welfare queens”, “crackheads” and other drug addicts, and the “promiscuous poor” (a phrase that has cropped up again and again in discussions of public benefits over more than a century).
These disparate perceptions aren’t just evidence of hypocrisy; they are literally a matter of life and death. In the US, the widespread belief that the poor are simply lazy has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients –even those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipients’ lives: rather than the intended consequence of pushing recipients into paid employment, the restrictions have simply left them without access to medical care or a sufficient food supply. Thus, in one of the richest counties in America, a boy living in poverty died of a toothache; there were no protests, and nothing changed.
Meanwhile, the “billionaire” in the White House starts his days at 11am – the rest of the morning is coyly termed “executive time” – and is known for his frequent holidays. “Nice work if you can get it,” quipped an opinion piece in the Washington Post.
We don’t hear much about laziness, drug addiction or promiscuity among the wealthiest members of society because – unlike Trump – most billionaires are not public figures and go to great lengths to seek privacy. Thus the motto of one London-based wealth management firm: “I want to be invisible.” This company, like many other service providers to the ultra-rich, specializes in preserving secrecy for clients. The wealthy people I studied not only had wealth managers but often dedicated staff members who killed negative stories about them in the media and kept their names off the Forbes “rich list”.
Many even present themselves as homeless – for tax purposes – despite owning multiple residences. For the ultra-rich, having no fixed residence provides major legal and financial advantages; this is exemplified by the case of the wealthy businessman who acquired eight different nationalities in order to avoid taxes on his fortune, and by the UK native I interviewed in his Dubai apartment building:
“I am not tax resident anywhere. The tax man says ‘show me a utility bill’, and the only utility bill I can present is for the house I own in Thailand, and it’s in a language that the European authorities aren’t familiar with. With all the mobility going on in the world, international marriages, governments can’t keep up with people.”
Meanwhile, the poor can end up being “resident nowhere” because no one will allow them to stay in one place for very long; as the sociologist Cristobal Young has shown, the majority of migrants are poor people. In addition, the poor are routinely evicted from housing on the slightest pretext, frequently driving them into homeless shelters – which are in turn forced to move when local homeowners engage in nimby (not in my back yard) protests. Even the design of public spaces is increasingly organized to deny the poor a place to alight, however temporarily.
It is as if the right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit have become luxury goods, available to those who can pay instead of being human rights. For the rich, deviance from social norms is nearly consequence-free, to the point where outright criminality is tolerated: witness the collective shrug that greeted revelations of massive intergenerational tax fraud in the Trump family.
For the poor, however, even the most minor deviance from others’ expectations – like buying ice cream or soft drinks with food stamps – results in stigmatization, limits on their autonomy, and deprivation of basic human needs. This makes life far more nasty, brutish and short for those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, creating a chasm of more than 20 years in life expectancy between rich and poor. This appears to some as a fully justified consequence of “personal responsibility” – the poor deserve to die because of their moral failings.
So while the behavior of the ultra-rich gets an ever-widening scope of social leeway, the lives of the poor are foreshortened in every sense. Once upon a time, they were urged to eat cake; now the cake earns them a public scolding.
What drives me nuts about the whole “boomers vs. millennials” narrative is like – its construction depends entirely on the erasure of already marginalized people.
“Boomer”, in these arguments, always means “white, affluent, and able-bodied”. The existence of poor, nonwhite, or disabled baby boomers contradicts the oppressor/oppressed paradigm, so they are simply ignored. “40 years ago everyone had a house and a job and lived in harmony” is a fiction. It has always been a fiction. It’s post-WWII propaganda constructed to dismiss systemic poverty and racism. Hold up the smiling suburban ideal and no one will notice the slums. It has never been true for more than a fraction of people, and it drives me batty how many millennials wholeheartedly buy into it. I’m sincerely sorry you can’t afford a house, but for the love of god stop acting like systemic inequality was just invented because you hadn’t noticed it before.
The fact that this narrative has gained so much momentum lately is probably due to the fact that the middle class is disappearing. More and more among those coming from non-marginalized families are becoming poor and coming in contact with inequality.
Problems remain unnoticed as long as only minorities experience it. Which is sad and dangerous not only for the minorities themselves, but for society as a whole.
I agree. People are comparing the middle class now to the middle class 40 years ago, and it’s not inaccurate to say that we’re comparatively worse off now. Problem is, the analysis ignores anyone who wasn’t middle-class or higher to begin with.
working class person: I’m forced to beg for money and am at the mercy of other people’s goodwill as I’m facing serious suffering and/or death because my wages don’t cover the expenses I need to literally stay alive
friends of working class person: we will scrape together some of our own funds at the possible detriment of our own families because we have no other choice if we don’t want our friend to, and we can’t believe we have to say this out loud, die
media: This Uplifting Story of Friendship Will Brighten Your Day :)) Look As These Brave People Go On Happy With Their Lives Despite Hardship :)) This Story Proves That Poor People Who Complain About Their Standards Of Living Are Just Not Trying Hard Enough :)))
to me, one of the weirdest things about our economy right now is the credential inflation
like my dad got a job as a mechanic when he graduated high school, and he was employed with a high school diploma to a full time job with a union, and had health insurance and benefits.
at this point, I have graduated from high school, have a Bachelor’s degree, have a Master’s Degree, have two years of experience working in my field, and am a due paying member of multiple professional organizations. And that qualifies me to compete in a two-stage interview process for a part time job that offers no health care.
This is what decades of stripping the working class of their rights looks like.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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