The little boy, age six, had two silver caps where his front teeth should have been.\u00a0\u00a0 Speculation was he must have been raised on sugary drinks instead of milk.\u00a0 He had awful, stale-smelling breath, such as I had never before experienced on a child.\u00a0 He could barely read and didn\u2019t care.\u00a0 His attention span was impossibly short.<\/p>\n
I was participating in a reading program for first-graders in a public school in a disadvantaged neighborhood.\u00a0 The program took place every day, with different volunteers on a rotating basis.\u00a0 We\u2019d get a 10-minute training session and then meet our kids, one on one, two children, half an hour each.<\/p>\n
The trainers asked us to work on specific reading skills each time, but this boy was too easily distracted.\u00a0 \u00a0He made jokes or fussed.\u00a0\u00a0 I tried to find out if he knew how to brush his teeth.\u00a0 He said yes but I didn\u2019t believe him.\u00a0 I wondered if he was hungry.\u00a0 He never admitted to it.\u00a0 The school had a free breakfast program, but the teachers told me some kids arrived too late and missed it; they implied this was another sign of chaos in the kids\u2019 homes.\u00a0 I asked the boy gently about his home life. \u00a0His evasive answers hinted that he spent after-school hours in the backyard with the dog, ignored by grownups, if any were around.\u00a0 Someone told me he had already been held back and was repeating first grade.<\/p>\n
My other student, a little girl, was also a poor reader who could not concentrate.\u00a0\u00a0 From her minimal descriptions I guessed she was in a single-mother household with no father present.\u00a0 Once I asked about other family members.\u00a0 \u201cGrandma does drugs,\u201d she said matter-of-factly, quietly knocking my guts across the room. There probably was no grandpa.\u00a0\u00a0 She missed several sessions. The teachers said she was often out sick.\u00a0 From what little I learned, she seemed, even more than the boy, to have an empty home life alone in bare surroundings. No guidance, no mental stimulation, too much neglect, and probably very little love.<\/p>\n
It was just chance that I got two severely troubled kids; I wasn\u2019t equipped to help them, and I didn\u2019t see much hope for their futures.\u00a0 Other children in the program were attentive and cooperative, and appeared to be benefitting.<\/p>\n
This year, the Legislature debated a proposal to tap the state\u2019s Permanent Fund for early childhood intervention programs. The proposal has been defeated for now, but it\u2019s backed by a large coalition and will no doubt be back next year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Permanent Fund is such a hot-button issue that legislative debate focused on the narrow issue of the money with less attention on how the money would be used. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the coming months, more New Mexicans should be examining the proposed programs to decide whether they merit as much confidence as the proponents are asking for.<\/p>\n
The programs are described on the website investinkidsnow.org<\/span>.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a detailed booklet, published by St. Joseph Community Health (a leading member of the coalition), that analyzes goals and strategies.\u00a0\u00a0 The goals are very ambitious, encompassing a broad range of social services to address a depressing and all too familiar list of social problems:\u00a0 poverty, illiteracy, mental health, teen pregnancy, and so on.<\/p>\n These programs go deeper than what we think of as the \u201ceducation\u201d system that begins at the schoolhouse door.\u00a0\u00a0 They involve major intervention into the lives of families. \u00a0And they require multi-agency coordination, something the New Mexico bureaucracy is not necessarily good at.<\/p>\n With so many New Mexico children growing up without education or prospects, we have to do something.\u00a0 Remembering those two children, I hope we muster the determination to do it right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The little boy, age six, had two silver caps where his front teeth should have been.\u00a0\u00a0 Speculation was he must have been raised on sugary drinks instead of milk.\u00a0 He had awful, stale-smelling breath, such as I had never before … Continue reading