Depressing Conversation with a Social Worker

[bleedingheart]

Yesterday I had coffee with a friend who is a social worker/psychologist, her particular job is to test children in elementary schools for either gifted or special needs programs.

She explained that at one particular school district in an impoverished area she is actually labeling kids as "special needs" not because they are mentally disabled or because they have learning problems...but because their parents have neglected to send them to school to the point that the children have not learned anything grade appropriate. Because the district is poor...they can't afford to have almost half or more of the kids repeating every grade...so they move them forward but then they qualify them for other programs to help these kid try and catch up...

I asked her point blank...What do you think society can do to help these people in these areas? and she had no answer...she said it is so overwhelming that she doesn't know what will make a difference. She knows that depression, drugs and hopelessness have made things worse for them but that unless the parents had enough sense to start making sure that junior got to school....that it will only continue the cycle.

I don't know...what will make a difference?

[shoelace414]

1. simple.. Tax cuts

:sarcasm:

[bleedingheart]

2. I can't believe how I could forget those effective tax cuts

and how they have just turned the US into a utopia...

:sarcasm:

[Wickerman]

3. Fund headstart?

Fund some daycare programs? Not send all our manufacturing jobs overseas so that there are some decent paying jobs at home? Funny, when parents work 2 or three jobs to make ends meet the family relationships suffer. Sometimes there is divorce and single parenthood, sometimes a kid just doesn't get a lot of attention from a parent who works 14 hour days.

Our kids are microcosms of our nation's failure of imagination. We give tax cuts to the rich, we militarily outspend all other countries combined, and we slash funding for the programs that will make certain we have a country of kids ready to go to school.

[bleedingheart]

7. Headstart is alive and well in that neighborhood

how can repubs think that parents working 60+ hours a week to keep food on the table and a roof over the family's head is a "family friendly" idea"??? How is that compassionate and concerned about the welfare of those families???

[fasttense]

4. I do volunteer work for the rural schools and I see the same thing.

It's like some of these parents can't even get out of bed at all. These kids are never supervised.

Some of it is drugs, some of it is poverty, some of it is this attitude that using your brains and talents is not cool and shows you think you are better than everyone else. Kids who try to get ahead are called preppy and told they are trying to live above their upbringing. It's OK to succeed in sports but to succeed with hard work and intelligence is looked down on. My husband is from this area and when his Aunt found out he got his bachelor's degree she said, "Good Lord, what are you going to do with all that education? You don't need it for a job. It's a waste."

Some kids are able to ignore this, some kids are taken in by it. It's spawned by isolation and poverty.

[bleedingheart]

5. my neighbor laments that she did not focus on education

now her two boys are dependent upon heavy labor or truck driving jobs which are harder to do as you age.

but...when they were in school she caved to their idea of being "cool" and not doing well enough in school....

[dcfirefighter]

6. A holistic solution

would involve improvements in poverty, families, freedom, tolerance, public funding, individual responsibility, economic justice, prosperity, employment, and opportunity.

Tax cuts are neither here nor there, nor, necessarily, is spending more on public education. In many cases, it's a problem money can't solve (though lack of funds exacerbates it), and/or it's already a well-funded district.

Tax cuts /in the right places/ would improve local government funding, justice, prosperity, employment, and opportunity. My favorite tax to rail against is the payroll tax, which raises the cost, for employer and employee, of working.

[Warpy]

8. In reality? Living wages

jack that minimum wage up. Reinstitute a progressive tax system, with confiscatory taxes on "wages" over a million a year. Nobody is worth that kind of money, no matter what PR job they've given themselves.

Give ordinary people enough to live decently on, raise their children on, and save for retirement on. Replace depression and hopelessness with optimism and hope. Make admission to state universities dependent on aptitude, not money, and try to get bright kids to go without putting them into a lifetime of debt. End legacy admissions.

End the free ride the corporations have had. Tax them so that they'll support the military they benefit from. We haven't benefited from the military since the end of WWII. They have. Make them cough it up. Institute punitive tariffs for corporations that are offshoring jobs while expecting the US to be their market. Withdraw the corporate charters of those corporations which prove themselves a danger to people and country, the equivalent of imposing a death sentence on any other citizen.

End the drug war. It's a failure. We lost. Poor folks bear the brunt of the failure.

[prole_for_peace]

9. affordable day care.

i used to go to school with kids who frequently had to stay home to take care of siblings while their parent(s) went to work. they had no one else and couldn't afford day care.