UCLA IDEA: Working families and public schools suffering since economic crisis
Emily Henry | 1-23-2010 | Comments |
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At Gratts Elementary School just north of downtown Los Angeles, Principal Titus Campos saw a young girl putting a bag of carrots into her pocket. As he watched the children eating their lunch, she circled the cafeteria, asking the other students: "Are you going to eat that?" She took their discarded fruits and vegetables, and tucked them away.
When Campos confronted the girl, wondering about her strange behavior, she gave him a nervous look. "Are you hungry?" he asked her. "Do you want me to get you some more food?" She told him that she was taking food home for her younger brother. Her parents were going through a hard time.
Campos paused as he retold the tale, holding back tears. "I have mixed feelings coming here," Campos told the audience who gathered Friday to hear UCLA IDEA leaders present their annual report on educational opportunities in California. "I'm honored to be here speaking, but to share some of these stories... it's sad. It really is." Hearing the dismal facts in the "California Educational Opportunities in Hard Times" report, Campos said, has also hit him hard.
"It's really, really difficult," he said, voice breaking.
The UCLA IDEA report, titled: "The Impact of the Economic Crisis on Public Schools and Working Families," indicates that conditions for students and parents in California has gone from bad, to "much worse." Before the Recession, one in six students lived in families with an income below the federal poverty level. Now, that ratio is one in four. Students are suffering from what some educators are calling a "hunger epidemic." Others are stuck in overcrowded classrooms, or simply plagued by a sense of hopelessness.
To illuminate the effects of the economic crisis, UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA) interviewed 87 principals across the state. What they found during the course of the interviews was a consensus on a number of facts about the state of affairs inside the classroom: class sizes have increased, teachers have been laid off, learning materials have been minimized, and extra-curricular programs have been cut. But aside from financial woes, the report also unearthed a deeper trend.
"One in three Los Angeles school children are living in poverty," said John Rogers, co-author of the Educational Opportunities report. "And that one-in-three mark reminds me of what President Roosevelt said in 1937. He described a nation where one third of the population was ill-clothed, ill-housed, ill-fed. As we talked to principals all across the state we heard those same conditions being described."At Gratts, 92 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The school has a transiency rate of 21 percent. "So in other words, that's the children that move in and out," said Campos. "It's because their families have lost their jobs, so we have a lot of families moving back to Mexico or moving to other states where it's less expensive to live." The effect on the children is clear, according to Campos. "It affects their continuity of instruction, so a lot of the students coming in we find that we have to refer them to get additional support from the schools."
However, in an unfortunate show of irony, while the need for social services has increased, the availability of programs that help the working families they serve has been severely limited.
"We heard principals talking about the fact that as they tried to refer families to social service agencies, they found that many of those agencies had experienced cutbacks themselves," said Rogers. In high-poverty schools, principals were three times more likely than those in low-poverty schools to report decreased availability of social services.
But all hope is not lost. Many schools are taking the problem into their own hands. "Across the state, teachers bought clothes, bought food and brought them into school to share with the students," said Rogers. The community effort, he noted, has been astounding.
(Left) Assemblywoman Judy Chu listened to speakers during the UCLA IDEA presentation.Although Friday's event was rife with political leaders concerned about education, including Assemblywoman Judy chu and LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia, the voices of parents, students and principals stole the show.
Blanca Dueñas, a working parent of five, stood in tears in front of the audience as she explained how hard it has become for her children to get a good education. "How are our children going to be taught if there aren't teachers?" Dueñas asked the crowd. "Our children are thinking, what's going to happen to our education, our graduation dreams, what we want to become in the future and in life? Why do they say no child left behind, when with these cuts that's what's happening? They're being left behind." Listen to Blanca (in Spanish):
Another parent, Martha Sanchez, who is also a member of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), says that the parents in her community are too over-worked and stressed to engage with schools. They have no time to attend parent-teacher meetings and are forced to become detached from the educational issues surfacing today. But problems at home are making their way into the classroom. On a number of recent occasions, Sanchez explained, children have been suspended from school for stealing food from the cafeteria. Communication between parents is almost non-existent, says Sanchez, and the wider family problems being faced at home need to become part of the conversation in schools. "The school system is set up just to talk about books and resources," said Sanchez. "We can't even talk about where we can get food and health services."
Tags: california charter schools economic crisis education hunger john rogers judy chu lausd monica garcia parents public education public schools recession teachers ucla idea work