Hope? It’s not supposed to have barriers

It’s tough to grow up poor and I am finding it gets a lot tougher for kids when they grow up in some Section 8 housing complexes.

I've been thinking a lot about low-income kids since a story out of Georgia about a turnaround school caught my eye.

Education is so important for these children to obtain to have a better life — and as my readers know from a previous column, I don't believe that always happens in a classroom.

But I do believe that stability and getting that early push in school during a child's formative years is crucial to their well being and success as an adult.

So do a team of lawyers and an elementary school principal in Atlanta.

How they turned around one school located opposite a Section 8 housing complex where 95 percent of students lived has me thinking about the kids who once lived at Church Street South.

For those readers who don’t know, residents were moved out of the Section 8 subsidized Church Street South complex due to deplorable living conditions.

A federal lawsuit against Northland Investment Corp., who operated the complex, charges it ignored serious problems and further asserts that the $3 billion development company either ignored or covered up serious conditions on the site with slipshod cosmetic work, taking advantage of the low-income tenants who had few options for other housing.

It is a problem for lowincome families and kids nationwide.

The newly hired principal at the Atlanta school was overseeing the worst performing school in the state and the poorest. She was grappling with poor grades and poor attendance, barriers educators in urban schools nationwide are familiar with.

But added to this was the 40 percent of students who disappeared annually from the enrollment rolls — something the prncipal found troubling.

Enter the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation — a group of volunteer tenants rights lawyers who established space inside the school's front office — and the turnaround began.

The lawyers found a direct correlation between the students’ poor academic performance and their unhealthy living conditions in that Section 8 complex.

Conditions included ceilings that collapsed due to water leaks and stoves that didn’t work and were not replaced for weeks at a time.

Some children were “missing school, sick from the mold that grew inside their apartment,” according to one parent.

With no money to fight the establishment, many families felt they had no choice but to leave, creating a revolving door in both the complex and the school as families moved in and out.

But with volunteer lawyers taking on the government to clean up its act, living conditions improved and so did grades. The turnover rate dropped to 25 percent.

In reading that report, it had me thinking about the kids who lived at Church Street South and the report that concluded conditions at that complex — which included water leaks and pervasive mold — led to high rates of asthma and other

ailments experienced by its residents.

The report stated 48 percent of 170 children who lived there had physician-diagnosed asthma.

It’s pretty hard to learn when you’re having trouble breathing.

But most of my thoughts are on how much these children’s ultimate layer of protection — local, state and federal government — has let them down.

While it is true raising children is not the government’s responsibility, ensuring governmental properties where these children live is a safe and clean environment and affording them an education is.

But getting an education for poor children — black and white — is projected to get

worse.

A study by researchers at Rice University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin states the rise in U.S. children living in poor neighborhoods since the Great Recession will greatly affect education.

Rachel Kimbro, a professor of sociology in Rice's School of Social Sciences and founding director of the Kinder Institute's Urban Health Program, said “regardless of individual family income, there is something about living in a higher poverty neighborhood that negatively affects education outcomes. This is a topic that should be of great concern for educators and policymakers alike.”

We live in a rich society and nowhere in the U.S. should children be suffering due to lack of responsibility from the government or entities representing the government.

Being poor is not a crime but what is being done to poor people is.

There are many children — poor, black, white, Hispanic and otherwise — who live in terrible conditions but go to school to hopefully one day have a better life and make their dreams come true. But for too many, those dreams are interrupted by a path that is detoured because of things they have no control over.

And that is a shame — because hope is not supposed to have barriers but fuel dreams for tomorrow.