Bridging the gap
Speaker encourages teachers to connect with students living in poverty
PEARCY — Donna Beegle knows all too well what it is like to live in generational migrant-labor poverty.
As president of Communications Across Barriers, she travels the country sharing her experiences growing up in poverty with school systems and children and adults living in poverty in hopes of bridging the gap and breaking the cycle of poverty.
“I work in all 50 states and all of my work has been word of mouth, and very often I work the schools where 100 percent of their kids are fighting the evil villain poverty,” she told educators from six of the seven public school districts gathered Thursday for the Countywide Professional Development event hosted by Dawson Education Service Cooperative at Lake Hamilton’s Wolf Arena.
“I go to staff meetings and I don’t see poverty on the agenda,” Beegle said. “Martin Luther King said if you don’t talk about poverty, you can’t address it. It’s like race. If you don’t talk about race, you’re going to have racism. So we have to say the ‘P’ word in order to get at these statistics that a child born into poverty is less likely to get an education today than they were in the ’40s.
“Our nation has nearly half of the children in our schools who are in some way fighting poverty. Might be situational. Might be generational. Might be working
class. It might be immigrant. But in some way poverty is impacting their lives.”
Beegle said she dropped out of school at 15 years old and got married. At 26 years old, she earned her GED, but wasn’t even able to read a newspaper at that time. She now has her doctorate in educational leadership.
“I couldn’t read a newspaper when I was 26. I didn’t know the words. I didn’t know what they were talking about,” she said. “All through school, I didn’t know the words that my teachers would use. They would talk about things and I would say ‘What does that word mean?’ and my teachers, with the best intentions, would say ‘You need to be a responsible, independent learner. Go look it up in the dictionary. I will not enable you.’
“My doctorate is educational leadership and sometimes I think about those comments and I think ‘Wait a second. Why wouldn’t you enable me? It was kind of your job.’ But the word enable in ignorance about the impacts of poverty often becomes an excuse for not helping. Maslow said ‘You cannot enable human beings who do not have their fundamental needs met.’ Because you can’t self-actualize. So if an action is not going to occur without your support, it’s not enabling.”
Beegle said there is an “epidemic of kids being placed in special education within a few weeks of school because they don’t know middle-class words.”
“Humans can’t learn meanings of words unless they have meaningful opportunities to interact in dialogue with people who know those words who will put them in context and relate them to their lived experience. This is like that,” she said.
Beegle said every day she works with students living in poverty who are considered to have an attitude or tendency to have a “smart mouth,” but because of their experiences with food insecurity, parents losing jobs, grandparents unable to afford medications, she validates the behavior because it is understandable in their situations. However, she helps them to keep from displaying those behaviors in the classroom in an uncalled for way and funneling that attitude into drive and determination to succeed.
“They are living in a war zone where their fundamental human needs aren’t met and the bullets of poverty every day inflict the people they love,” she said.
“Validate. Focus on what’s right about students and build on that. Those are evidence-based best practices.
“Most students in poverty don’t even know why they’re in school. The deeper the poverty, the less they know its purpose because they have no meaningful relationships with people who use education to learn a living,” she said.
Beegle said in one school district she did an exercise where they pasted the names of every student on the wall and the task was to place a pink dot on the name of every student each teacher knew a nonacademic fact about.
Hundreds of students, she said, had several dots on their name, but the couple of hundred students who did not receive dots had a direct correlation with their grades and attendance.
“The kids in the school building that nobody knew anything about were the ones we were losing,” she said. “So in their actual planning process, teachers came up with the idea that they would each take five of the names of the kids who got no dots and they would make daily contact with them.”
Daily contact was defined by seeking students out and asking how they were doing and then sharing something about themselves.
At first, the students were confused by the interactions. But all teachers recorded that at the end of 90 days, these students were seeking them out for help.
“They now had an insider who they could say ‘Do you know what this word means?’ ‘I’ve got this assignment; I don’t even know where to begin.’ They had somebody who knew academic stuff.”
Beegle said it is very easy to build common ground with students facing poverty and that if educators spend one week helping students see how they are alike with one another and with their teachers, the school year will be completely different.
“And you know what you won’t have? You won’t have bullying because human beings don’t bully people like me … we bully ‘other,’” she said. “And when we stay at level one of self-disclosure just teaching our subject or doing our job, whatever our role is in the school and the kids know nothing about us, we stay at the level one. We are ‘other.’ And if you are ‘other,’ I can never be like you and that would be ‘be educated.’
“Most kids living in poverty have nobody in their life who has benefited from education. The deeper the poverty, the more that’s true. So we have to build identification with our students so they see that you’re just a person. I encourage you to share your life story. Share your life story right off the bat. Let them see you as a person and you will have a different year.”