The Minneapolis Foundation has a commitment to transforming education and eliminating homelessness. The cross section of these two issues creates a highly mobile population of students who are regularly switching schools or missing class altogether. I can’t imagine how a child is able to make academic progress with a lack of stability. If students are worried about where they are going to sleep tonight, can they really focus on algebra? Rising rates of foreclosures have forced more families to move, to double up, stay in shelters, or worse, making a deep impact on student achievement.
I recently heard Zib Hinz, Minneapolis Public Schools’ district liaison for homeless and highly mobile students speak. She shared that at the end of the 2008 school year there were nearly 5,500 homeless or highly mobile students in the school system. This equals two students in every classroom!! Two children!! To be able to visualize a classroom and see two children at their desks without a stable home to return to at the end of the day pulled strongly at my heart strings. In a period where the news is filled with data of overwhelming doom and gloom – increases in demand at food shelves, higher unemployment rates, nonprofits closing their doors- the thought of two kids touched me in a deep way.
I was thinking about this affect recently when reading a Newsweek article by Peter Singer, a professor of Bioethics at Princeton, who has a new book called “The Life You Can Save.” Professor Singer shares the idea of “futility thinking” in which people find some problems so vast that it feels futile to even attempt to make a difference.
Homelessness and education reform are highly complex issues. It is hard to get my head or my hands or my pocketbook around how to make an impact on these vast problems. Yet, putting a number on this distinct group – 5,550 students – 2 in each classroom – gave me something that I could grasp and potentially be able to affect.
As Zib said, “With numbers so large it can feel overwhelming. But it’s important to remember that every little bit of help still helps somebody. We need to keep offering that help.”
How do we avoid falling into futile thinking and make problem solving achievable?
Here is a fact sheet on homelessness produced by The Minneapolis Foundation with some potential action steps.
Here is Peter Singer on The Colbert Report for a little laugh of the day.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | Education, Homelessness
