I was scheduled to give a speech at the Get Schooled conference on education reform yesterday, sponsored by the Gates Foundation and Viacom. My speech had been perfectly trimmed to fit the allotted time, and already loaded in the teleprompter.
Then I read Erik Eckholm's moving story in the New York Times on the surge of homeless schoolchildren caused by the epidemic of home foreclosures. The story was accompanied by a photo that haunted me.
It showed 9-year-old Charity Crowell, of Asheville, North Carolina whose family's home had been foreclosed on. As recounted by Eckholm, Charity had picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school, while vowing to bring her grades back up from the Cs she got last spring when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and forced to move into a series of friends' houses and then a motel -- and now a trailer, from which they are also facing eviction.
I've already been thinking a lot about the human cost of the millions of foreclosures taking place across America. But after I read this article, I dug deeper into the impact of foreclosures on schoolchildren. And I wanted to communicate the sense of urgency I felt to the thousand people gathered at the conference, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller, New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein, and Stephen Colbert, who emceed the event. So I decided to scrap my planned speech and talk about the crisis.
We don't have the current numbers of homeless school children. The latest national data we have is from last spring, when there were over one million schoolchildren who were homeless. But since last spring, two million more jobs have been lost, and home foreclosures have continued to rise at an epidemic pace. How many of the million homes that have received foreclosure filings in the last six months included school age children?
We have anecdotal evidence from school districts like San Antonio, which has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school -- double the amount as at the same point last year.
We live in a country that, one year ago this month, came together with a sense of national emergency, and bailed out banks that were "too big to fail."
Shouldn't we also be living in a country that can come together right now and bail out schoolchildren that are too small to be allowed to fail before they have been allowed to succeed?
"I couldn't go to sleep," 9-year-old Charity said of her last semester. "I was worried about all the stuff." As a result, she often fell asleep in class.
Since 2001, federal law has required every school district to appoint a liaison to the homeless charged with identifying and helping families, including sending school buses to pick up the kids sleeping in run-down motels, or living in cars, homeless shelters, or on the streets.
But school superintendents report that while this is a worthy law, Congress has largely passed the costs on to states and cities already facing massive budget deficits.
And we know that every day more and more families with schoolchildren are losing their homes. And more and more school districts are trying to bridge the gap and meet the growing need.
Eckholm tells the story of Emily Walters, the Buncombe County school district's liaison to the homeless, who "is busy as school begins, providing backpacks and other supplies, and signing homeless children up for free breakfasts and lunches."
The evening before school began, Ms. Walters drove 45 minutes to an RV campground to deliver a scientific calculator and other essential school supplies to Cody Curry, 14, who lives with his mother, Dawn, and his brother, Zack, 11, in a camper. Mrs. Curry had to downsize from a trailer, she said, when her work as a sales clerk was cut to two days a week.
"We see 8-year-olds telling Mom not to worry, don't cry," Bill Murdock, who is also working with homeless school children, told Eckholm.
It's hard to hear stories like these and not be outraged that, as a country, we have given trillions of dollars to save banks like Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo that are now turning around and refusing to modify mortgages, so that at least people with children can stay in their homes.
It's important to remember that many of the people losing their homes now are not people with crazy sub-prime mortgages or who took out massive loans they couldn't afford. They are hard working, middle class Americans who have lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet.
It's equally important to remember that these are the same banks that used bailout money -- our money -- to hire lobbyists to kill legislation in the Senate this spring that would have saved over a million-and-a-half people from losing their homes.
Even judges are getting angry. Judges like Arthur Schack of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn who regularly refuses banks' petitions for foreclosure if every i is not dotted and every t is not crossed. "If you are going to take away someone's house," he told the New York Times, "everything should be legal and correct. I'm a strange guy -- I don't want to put a family on the street unless it's legitimate."
Home foreclosures are a gateway calamity, magnified exponentially when they affect America's children. Teaching our kids is tough enough under normal circumstances; it becomes nearly impossible when you add in the instability and inherent distress of homelessness.
So we need to take steps. And we need take them now. For starters, when there are children affected by the pending foreclosure, we need to revisit legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of home loans -- the horribly named cramdown provision. HuffPost's Ryan Grim reported today that Barney Frank plans to make cramdown part of the financial regulatory reform bill set to come before Congress this fall. We should make sure that the banking lobbyists aren't able to kill it again.
We should also require mandatory mediation between homeowners and lenders prior to any foreclosure. Currently, many lenders make it next to impossible for homeowners facing foreclosure to reach them. Pilot programs along these lines have succeeded in preventing or delaying foreclosures in the majority of cases. Then why don't we insist that mediation happens -- at least when there are schoolchildren involved?
In my original speech, I had planned to talk about the importance of teaching empathy to our children. The crisis of homeless students is an opportunity for all of us to teach it to our children by demonstrating it -- at the public policy level, as well as at the private charity level.
As a society, we cannot stand by and allow the banks we saved to bolster their bottom lines, then coldly and cavalierly write off our most vulnerable citizens, our children.
This is about much more than money. It's about our priorities as a nation. The conference focused on the need to rebuild our educational infrastructure. And that's incredibly important. But there is a fire blazing -- the rising homelessness among schoolchildren. And we desperately need to act before it turns into a conflagration.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
One question I want to know is why we can't fracture the "too big to fail" banks into many pieces, like we did with Ma Bell. It seems that this would stop a lot of the excesses and future problems.
Conservatism was created to resist the French revolution and the Enlightenment, What did you expect?
I saw the same news broadcast and it was heartbreaking. Thank you for sharing the story with your readers.
I know this , there is a lot of misery in this Great and Rich Country
In the last eight years, as a manager , always try to help people
to get their lives better.by showing to them how to think positive, out of the box thinking ,never give up,put their brains to work smart and productive and thinking for tomorrow not yesterday
given more hours to work ,to make some extra money,(i lost a job because my payroll was high )
but I never learn i keep doing this in my present job.I am very good what i do (keep cost down,waste zero, revenues up, customer satisfaction 100%..... but my payroll is up...
I have to do what is helpful for people.
The millions of Americans who their Finances are down and out the only way to recover is only if they STOP LISTEN TV,STOP WATCH TV,AND STOP GIVE THEIR MONEY TO THE BIG BUSINESS
FOR NOTHING IN RETURN.
Every single trancecection we do all day the big business take a cut out of our money.Does not matter if we use credit or debit.(that is why they all give us easily credit and access to use money in the first place) CASH IS THE ANSWER ...Second, we do not buy anything that is not priority or necessity .
Today I tell people to get back to the basics. When things seem too costly, grow your own, make your own, persevere without assistance. Each of us can break away from our dependence and do for ourselves with just a little effort.
Take a few moments to think about that.
you know the rule of 80% --20% LOOK FOR IT (ITALIAN PHILOSOPHER COME WITH IT IN 1900'S
USED TO BE :80% of the wealth of the planet is in the hands of the 20% of the population of the planet
the last 7-8 years (thanks to Bush and the Republicans)THE ABOVE NUMBERS ARE THOSE.
90% OF THE WEALTH OF THE PLANET IS IN THE HANDS OF 10% OF THE POPULATION
IF YOU WANT MORE INFORMATION '' FORTUNE'' and ''MONEY'' magazines (2007-2008 issues)
have everything you need to know.
For instance, I'd like to see every single Republican member of the United States Congress pay a visit to the waiting room of a public hospital that accepts charity patients -- those patients not only without health insurance for themselves and their families but without much of anything else. I'd like to see each member of the national GOP caucus bend forward there as I had occasion to do recently and look into the tear-stained face of a poor, sick woman in that setting who is muttering over and over, "I'm in big trouble. I'm in big trouble." But that'll happen for the Republicans when pigs fly, eh?
If anyone can help...or guide...or suggest...anything...please, please help.
Drop me a line at my username at g ma i l dotcom and I will pass your resume to my husband. Can't promise anything but a look.
Any objective observer from outside this country would have to conclude two things: (1) we don't love our children, and (2) a massive transfer of wealth from the young to the old is taking place. The poverty rate for our children is almost twice the rate for the elderly. If only children could vote!
Learn more and link to the census data at http://strength.org/blog/jeff_wiedner/poverty_data_day/.
This is why Grandma and Grandpa lose a paid-off house.
Capitalism has long been lauded as a superior form of politico-economic systems, at least in the free world. In the last year or so, the fallacies of capitalism have been blatantly exposed. The near fatal demise of the world economic system, anchored in Wall Street, was fueled by greed, avarice and irresponsibility. These elements would spell absolute failure for average citizens but for bankers, insurance companies and industrialists not only forgivable but financially renewable. So logically one might think that those who survived, but for the grace of the American taxpayers, would willingly recognize the need to assist mortgage holders, thus reducing the exploding population of homeless school children.
But no, it appears that the legislators and courts will be forced to mandate appropriate moral and ethical corporate behavior and all of this from many individuals professing Judeo-Christian beliefs. It is impossible to view this issue without remember the adage proclaiming money as the root of all evil. Never has that notion been more founded in truth.
grandfather lost his job as a salesman for a tailer shop ( a great
paying job at the time), and his wife had left him...my mother (14
at the time) had to quit school to care for her 4 siblings...and feed
a family of 5 on 50 cents a day ( mostly soup). She would go down
to the local butcher shop and ask the butcher for a few bones for
her dog ( the butcher knew the real reason). He would give her a
wink and would leave some meat on the bones. My grandfather
was faced with foreclosure on his small one-bedroom house, and
the FDR Administration set-up government offices to help during
this crisis. My Grandfather went to the local office...and they asked
him what he could afford, and he said $15 a month. They ( the government)
accepted his offer. That is why FDR is so loved by the World War 2
generation. And my question today is...where is this compassion today??
Why, for godssakes, do our children have to suffer like this when we
as a country have so much???
Why does so much of the Obama's administration's approach to the economy seem like Reagonomics or supply side economics?
People would have had more money to invest in the economy. In the sixties, there was relatively little dealt and the economy was at its strongest. People could start businesses. Without debt, people could take care of their families better. People would still not be losing their homes.
This loan economy works exactly how they worked it against serfs in Europe and here with ex-slaves with the share cropping and as it was done to indentured servants. Most people don't ever get out of debt as it takes ever and ever more from their expenses. It is designed that way.