Attitude Adjustment

     I was a child of wealth and privilege, a spoiled rotten little white girl.  Of course I never knew that until I went out into the community in which I work and visited the homes of my new students.  Over three days I met with twenty families to do the staggering amount of paperwork required to enroll their children in Pre-K before school starts next week.  By the end of the first day I was a roiling bucket of emotions, humbled and feeling incredibly blessed to have been raised in a safe and loving home with everything I needed and a good bit of stuff I wanted.  I was also angry at some mamas, sad for some children and disgusted with a system that rewards and perpetuates ignorance and laziness.  I learned a lot about the different cultures coexisting in that small community and that stereotypes don't apply to everyone.

     My first stop was at a nice new brick home outside of town where a single mother and her son live alone.  She works nights so her mother and aunt pitch in to help with him.  Her mother is a teacher and she has an uncle who is a firefighter and they are a hard-working bunch of folks who take care of their children and teach them to take care of their things.  The little boy was well-behaved and talkative and I left feeling quite good about things and glad to know the kids I work with are valued in their homes and taught to behave despite what they have shown me in school over the past fifteen years.  The next stop changed my mind.

     I have known the older children of the next family for several years.  They are a pitiful bunch since they are all in Special Education and their classroom teachers have had to do everything from feeding to clothing them since they started school.  I have smelled them and heard rumors of their living conditions but had never seen their home.  Home is too nice a word.  It is nothing short of a hovel.  And I have been in dog kennels that were cleaner.

      This photo is one I snagged elsewhere since I cannot post my students' homes on a personal page, but it is an accurate representation of this family's dwelling place.  I saw a lot of low-income homes that day, but this is the only one that I would call filthy.  I got so angry.  The mother made half my salary just on the kids' disability income and this mobile home was so old that any mortgage would have been paid off twenty years ago.  So why couldn't they have replaced the broken front door, gotten some floor covering that wasn't rotten from water leaking somewhere and plugged the holes around the windows to keep the air conditioning in and the insects out?  Or how about buying some clothes that fit the children and some kitchen items?  The middle child was sipping ice water from a peanut butter jar while the semi-nude youngest was sloshing a soda out of the can and onto anything in his path.
     Poverty and filth do not go hand-in hand.  There are many people who have lower incomes than the aforementioned household, but their homes are spotless.  Pride doesn't cost a thing.  The Hispanic migrant families I visited had very little in the way of furniture and some had used bungee cords to turn sheets into makeshift curtains, but their homes were tidy and their children were clean and well-behaved.  This sense of pride shows in the type of students these children become.

      I won't dwell on the dwellings because I saw a common thread running through all of these homes.  All of my Little Ones were smiling.  They hugged me and are excited to come to school.  They don't know if they are getting the short end of the stick or not and I certainly won't tell them.  I am going to try really hard to not think about where they sleep at night but focus on what I can give to them.  Each of these kids deserves the same amount of love, praise, structure and education as the next.  I wasn't really a spoiled wealthy child in the material sense, but I was (and still am) loved, valued and special to my parents.  I can give that back...along with cupcakes on their birthdays.