A moral right to go to school
Posted October 6, 2009 // 0 Comments // add yours
By Grant Oliphant
I ran into my friend Joe Lagana at Starbucks early this morning. Joe runs an outfit called the Homeless Children’s Education Fund a nonprofit that works to keep homeless children from falling through the educational cracks and missing out on school. He was poring over this morning’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and he had already cut out an article 4 kids’ problem is school minus a home from the front page detailing the plight of four homeless children who are having to go to court to gain the right to attend school in the Carlynton School District. It’s tempting to read articles like that as though the ugly reality they describe applies only to those individuals. Joe robbed me of that comfort. “We figure they represent several hundred kids in this area—couch-surfing, moving from place to place, no real address,” he said. “I understand the problem for the schools is who is going to pay for these kids,” he added. “But what about the moral right of these kids to go to school?” It was the sort of no-nonsense question I have come to expect of Joe, and exactly the right question for us all to be asking about a story like this. These children are not someone else’s problem, a line item in a budget to be offloaded elsewhere. Joe is a well-mannered, elegant man who to my knowledge rarely swears, but as he said to me this morning, “I’ve heard lots of school officials say, ‘Hey, this isn’t our responsibility,’ but if our society isn’t going to be responsible for educating these kids, then who the hell is going to?”
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS Feed
