The Net

Mitt "Catcher's" Romney may have been on to something when he said that the very poor are doing fine. There is a safety net to catch them if something goes wrong, and he promises that if something goes wrong with that net we will do what it takes to fix it.
Bad news, Mitt: The net is already broken. One in four children in America is living in poverty. Twenty-five percent. These are the ones that Salamander Gingrich was suggesting could get jobs cleaning up their school to offset the embarrassment of accepting food stamps. This is one quarter of our next generation. I get to meet a lot of them at my job, where I do see many of them helping out by cleaning the cafeteria or picking up the playground. We don't pay them. It's their school. We are teaching them. And they are teaching us.
More than eighty-five percent of the kids at our school qualify for the free lunch program. This includes breakfast as well, and a snack if they stay for the after school program. Nothing wrong with the safety net there, unless it's the food that we have for them. We do the best we can with what we have.
There is some magic formula for figuring out how to get the right amount of money for each student, but that part of the net could use some inspection. There are those who would like to tie funding to test scores. Others have suggested that once students perform at a certain level, that funding can be taken away. For example, as a reward for bringing our school out of Program Improvement, we have had our Title One funds cut. As our teachers and kids close the achievement gap, the money begins to dry up. Once they are all reading and writing at grade level, that net gets smaller and smaller.
These are kids. Like Sammy, a first-grader, who was still in the office after school the other day because his mother had forgotten to pick him up. His aunt wasn't answering her phone. He had worked on his homework and drawn his pictures and was still waiting when it was time for our secretary to go home. She offered to drive Sammy to his house. Sammy had already been at school since seven forty-five that morning, and it was nearly four thirty. He had put in a full day. He got home all right, and made it back to school the next morning, ready to brave the dangers high above the crowd in the safety net.