Teacher, My Dad Lost His Job. Do We Have to Move?

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WORTHINGTON, Ohio — Diane and Eric Kehler tried not to talk about it in front of the children, but as Jen Hegerty, the guidance counselor at Wilson Hill Elementary School, says, “Children have eagle ears.”

Mr. Kehler lost his $90,000-a-year job as an information technology manager. And though he and his wife discussed their problems in whispers, eagle ears don’t miss much. Their son Mathias, 12, a quiet, cerebral sixth grader at Wilson Hill, got quieter. “Our house was sort of in a state of despair. We weren’t as happy as usual,” Mathias said. “I stopped having good ideas to talk about with my friends.”

Mrs. Kehler has a college degree but had chosen to be a stay-at-home mother. That ended. She took a job at McDonald’s to cover the cost of groceries. At school, Mathias and his sister, Leah, a fourth grader, qualified for reduced-price lunches.

Keeping all that worry bottled up hurt. While Leah would not tell anyone her worst fear, she told her speech teacher, Shelley Smith, the second worst: that her family would have to move away and Leah would lose her friends. “I was worried and scared and very worried,” recalled Leah, who’s 10.

She chose Mrs. Smith to tell because the two have the same, exact birthday and every year they celebrate by eating Mrs. Smith’s homemade cupcakes. “She was just the right person,” Leah said. “She’s very calm.”

The Kehlers have lots of company. While Wall Street is pumping, Main Street bleeds. This middle- to upper-middle-class suburban town of 14,000 bordering Columbus has 22 percent of its students getting subsidized lunches. That’s up from 6 percent in 2005, when the economy was booming.

Full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/education/31winerip.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

"While Wall Street is pumping, Main Street bleeds." BAM right there.

Oh, interesting how the NY Times decided to do a story about struggling middle class families in Ohio after the criminal conviction of Kelly Williams-Bolar, an Ohio mother who falsified an address to get her children to a better school. She lived in Akron but used her father's suburban address.

[Hannah Bell]

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