Policy failures put schools on front line of child poverty

No choice: Surrey’s inner-city programs get kids to class, feed them and provide bus passes

Anyone who questions whether child poverty is real in British Columbia should go back to school. Schools are at the nexus of various governments’ policy failures — high housing prices, low wages, low welfare rates, clusters of children who don’t learn English at home, inadequate mental health and addictions services.

Teachers see it in the faces of the kids who come to school hungry, ill-clothed with bed-bug bites and yawning because they haven’t got a decent bed to sleep in. Or it shows up in the absentee rates.

To get a snapshot of what it looks like at the school level, Surrey is a good place to go since it is British Columbia’s largest school district with 70,000 students.

Surrey has more kids in need than in Vancouver, where the city recently donated $320,000 that will be used to help feed elementary school kids. (None of that money will be used for the estimated 1,200 hungry students in secondary schools.)

In Surrey, 32 of its 125 schools are designated as inner city.

That designation is made after looking at the numbers of students who are welfare recipients, kids in care, single-parent and single-income families, refugees, are learning English as a second language, or live in crowded dwellings.

At 11 of Surrey’s elementary schools, there are between 25 and 50 children who are identified as being at risk because they have poor attendance and when they do come, they’re usually late.

They arrive hungry and often without lunch. Nearly half are either learning English as a second language or have literacy skills one or two grades lower than their age.

For kids lucky enough to be at those designated schools, the Surrey School District runs a program called Attendance Matters. Parents must register their kids and the students must show up every morning by 7:45 a.m. If they don’t, an outreach worker starts calling to find out where the students are.

If it happens often, the outreach worker makes a home visit and devises a plan. Plans might include daily wake-up calls from the worker, finding a walk-to-school buddy or bus passes for kids who live too far to walk. (We’ll come back to bus passes.)

When the kids arrive, they help set and prepare breakfast, which consists of eggs, milk, fruit, yogurt, cereal, cheese and toast. After helping clean up, they can read alone or in groups. They can play games and do activities aimed at improving literacy skills in small groups, guided by a child-care worker.

At 8:30, off they go to the gym or outside for a bit of exercise before the school day officially starts at 8:45 a.m.

Making it work requires three part-time school staff and two volunteers at each school and $48,000 a year for the food alone.

Is it worth the cost? Anecdotally, yes. But researchers from Simon Fraser University are studying the program as part of a project to determine parents’ attitudes toward school attendance and what can be done to assist parents in getting their kids to school.

Now, about the bus tickets. It’s a problem throughout Metro Vancouver, but Surrey has put a price tag on it — $95,000 a year for 1,500 at-risk students at its 12 inner-city secondary schools and for kids in elementary schools.

Here are some examples: A Grade 10 girl, who can’t walk very well because of a health problem, lives four kilometres from school.

En route, she’s frequently propositioned by men looking to buy sex and is sometimes followed by them in cars. Understandably, it frightens her. With no money for bus fare, some days she just stays home.

At another school, a Grade 11 boy volunteers and takes part in two after-school programs. He’s got some learning problems and is overweight, which makes him a target for bullies. He’s nervous about walking home alone and so are his teachers. It’s not right that there are such gaps that vulnerable kids fall through. And it bears emphasizing that schools have neither the mandate nor the money to fix these societal problems. But until all governments work together to fix the underlying problems, it’s left to teachers, principals, individuals and charities like The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-a-School and others to fill those gaps. That’s not right either. But until there are some big changes made, what choice do we all have but to do what we can to feed these at-risk kids and keep them safe?

Until all governments work together to fix the underlying problems, it’ s left to teachers, principals, individuals and charities like The Vancouver Sun’ s Adopta-School and others to fill those gaps.