We keep reading glowing stories about the economy but very little about low wages, barely enough to live on.
We read very little about the schools and classrooms that maintain food pantries for families or the teachers who pay for their students’ school supplies.
Here is a teacher in Maynardsville, Tennessee, who maintains a “hygiene cabinet” in her classroom, where students can get free toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, tampons, and other necessities.
The locked metal cabinet doesn’t look amiss in Sarah Helms’ sixth grade classroom, with its bright yellow walls and green plastic stationery caddies. But rather than pencils, pens or binder paper, its shelves hold bottles of shampoo and body wash, soap, deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrushes, cotton swabs, sanitary pads and tampons.
For the past three school years, Helms, an English teacher at Horace Maynard Middle School in Maynardville, Tennessee, has stocked a “hygiene closet” with personal care items donated for students from low-income families by fellow teachers, current and former Horace Maynard parents, and members of the community. Helms uses cash donations to buy supplies at the dollar store. Her parents gave her the cabinet.
Are you listening, Governor Bill Lee? Are you listening, Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Marsha Blackburn?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
To our great shame. . . .
At the same time our flim flam man, #45, is eagerly working to gut our social safety net. He is going to do some voodoo economics and redefine “poverty” so more children go hungry while he protects his tax cuts for the wealthy. This administration is social Darwinism at its worst. https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-trump-budget-20190312-story.html
I read the comments and there are people who put down the teacher for handling out freebees.
How sad is it that people have no understanding of how terrible it is to be poor. I remember times when my mother didn’t have money for sanitary pads and I’d go off to school with one made of rolled up cloth.
Poverty isn’t fun. How about doing something to help people instead of millions for a worthless wall? Why isn’t the minimum wage high enough for people to survive on if they are working full time? Why do the wealthy and corporations get a tax cut and the poor are left with nothing? Why is there ALWAYS money for expanding the military?
As I said before. This country is sick.
Meanwhile, back in Nashville, new Tennessee governor, Bill Lee forges ahead with his regressive philosophy of using vouchers, which will help the poor people in Maynardsville by making sure they have great public schools to go to. His scandal-ridden buddies send racists texts and jet off to distant lands while Alexander thinks about retirement and Marsha Blackburn talks about how dangerous the poor guys are coming across that border, armed to the teeth.
Most if not all Republicans and neo-liberal and/or libertarian Democrats do not want to see, do not want to hear, and avoid poor people except when it comes time to lie and stir the fear to gain their votes
Ed reformers in Tennessee were too busy passing vouchers to do any work on behalf of public school students. Now they’ll be tied up with an FBI investigation into the voucher vote so you can just write them off for the rest of year.
Florida ed reformers spent from January to May passing vouchers and they’ll be spending the rest of the year litigating the voucher funding. Chalk 2019 up as yet another year where no one bothers with public schools.
They never seem to get around to the public school students. There’s that one day when the NEAP scores come out and that’s the extent of the attention paid for the year.
The GREAT state of Indiana proves itself again.
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[NWI Times] Report: May school votes failed at highest rate in 8 years
INDIANAPOLIS — A published report says Indiana’s May school referendums failed at their highest rate in 8 years.
The Indianapolis Star reports six of the 10 referendums on Indiana primary ballots Tuesday were approved. Proposals to support a new elementary school, school safety projects and money to raise teacher pay were some of the proposals that voters rejected…
https://www.nwitimes.com/news/education/report-may-school-votes-failed-at-highest-rate-in-years/article_bac7caee-7ed3-5543-a0db-0330beb22ee5.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share
Ben Carson is another Trump appointee who has forgotten about hardships. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is getting old. I am SO sick of Trump and his unending desire to hurt people. “Our scarce public resources”? How about not giving so much to the wealthy who don’t need more of ‘our scarce public resources’? Steve Miller is the ‘brains’ behind Trump.
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HUD says 55,000 children could be displaced under Trump plan to evict undocumented immigrants
May 10 at 7:00 AM
The Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledged that a Trump administration plan to purge undocumented immigrants from public housing could displace more than 55,000 children who are all legal U.S. residents or citizens.
The proposed rule, published Friday in the Federal Register, would tighten regulations against undocumented immigrants accessing federally subsidized housing to “make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said last month.
But the agency’s analysis of the rule’s regulatory impact concluded that half of current residents living in households potentially facing eviction and homelessness are children who are legally qualified for aid.
Current rules bar undocumented immigrants from receiving federal housing subsidies but allow families of mixed-immigration status as long as one person — a child born in the United States or a citizen spouse — is eligible. The subsidies are prorated to cover only eligible residents.
The new rule, pushed by White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, would require every household member be of “eligible immigration status.”
Undocumented immigrants may no longer sign the leases of subsidized housing, even if their children are entitled to prorated benefits…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/10/hud-says-children-could-be-displaced-under-trump-plan-evict-undocumented-immigrants/?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.aa516e29794d
Trump is a mean spirited, morally bankrupt blight on our country. This is a new low. Punishing children for the perceived slight of their parents. All children deserve a stable home. Many of the displaced children are American citizens.
Two days ago, at a rally here in Florida, Trump posed aloud the question, what should we do about the people at the border. Someone in the crowd yelled, “Shoot them.” Trump got a big laugh out of that–thought it very, very funny. This is a sick, evil man. And Miller is the same. Nazis.
Bob Shepherd: It also shows the mental level of some of his supporters. What causes people to hate so much? I guess looking down upon others makes one feel superior. Sick.
Trump is an evil being who spreads hatred and fear. Steven Miller is his ‘brains’. Neither has any compassion nor ability to understand hardship. Unfortunately, I believe there is something massively wrong with our society when people this horrible are elected. The whole GOP, and some Dems aren’t much better. Kick or shoot people when they’re down and out and starving. What a “Christian’ nation.
It’s astonishing to me that the president of the country can behave in this way, and millions will give it a pass. What the heck?!?!?
the never-spoken truth about the USA’s fanatic love affair with guns is that it comes with a dark yearning to find reason to actually shoot the guns at other humans
I’m not sure about that. For a long, long time, from the perspective of the Europeans, this was a frontier country, and they were hunters. This is a strong legacy in the United States. In many parts of the country, this “sport” is still widely practiced. So, there’s that element too. Unfortunately, weapons and modern urban environments simply don’t mix. I suspect that a lot of these people in the Trump crowd, if you got them one on one, would not be so awful. There is a madness that comes out in crowds, and it’s fed by these Internet islands that people live on, in which their news all comes from crazy alt-right sources.
Bob, I think many people would shoot their guns at humans. In fact, this is why we have so many gun deaths. People here are not crazier than in Europe. The difference: here people have guns.
People were hunters in Europe too. I think if we want to understand why people were more willing to get rid of guns in Europe, I think it’s best to look at what guns did during the two world wars in Europe.
An excellent point, Mate. We have been relatively sheltered here.
Sadly, Bob, #45’s rally was about an hour and a half from where I live. They say in Florida the further north you go, the further south you get.
That’s a wonderful phrase, retired teacher!
I need to provide these necessities too. I will. Too many of my students sleep in cars. In America.
LeftCoastTeacher: Thank you for caring so much.
We are a ‘wealthy country’ that doesn’t care about the poor. Let them suffer and they’ll feel so much better when they ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’. What nonsense.
Thank you. It’s important.
I think it is more accurate to say, that ours is a wealthy nation, that has FAILED the poor.
After over 50 years, and over $5 TRILLION in federal spending on the “war on poverty”, poverty has won. see
https://www.heritage.org/welfare/commentary/how-the-war-poverty-was-lost
The black family is destroyed. Millions of fatherless youths roam our inner cities.
Charles,
You don’t know what you are talking about yet you spout this rightwing garbage shamelessly.
Anything published by Heritage is rightwing drivel, for starters, and I won’t post your nonsense anymore. I live in the biggest city in the nation, and there are no gangs of “fatherless” black boys roaming the streets. Where is your brain?
I think we need a fund to pay for a year’s subscription to The Progressive and The Nation for Charles. Help to wean him away from the Heritage publications.
Charles, LBJ’s so-called “War on Poverty” did more good than Nixon’s the “War on Drugs” did.
I wonder how many people know where most of the national debt comes from. It isn’t from LBJ’s program to deal with poverty. It came mostly from the massive defense spending since the end of World War II.
Up until President Reagon’s infamous trickle down crap and massive tax cuts, the U.S. was paying down its debt caused by World War II. Since Reagon, the U.S. has spent more on all the failed wars it has fought in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the other country’s our Special Forces raid and attack (about 130 countries a year) than the total national debt.
If the U.S. had transitioned to a peacetime stance after Korea, and Reagon hadn’t been president, I do not think there would be a national debt today or it would be very small.
Here is the info from child trends:
https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/births-to-unmarried-women
I live in Metro WashDC. There are many thousands of fatherless youths in our nation’s capital area.
According to the US Census Bureau, 57.6% of black children are living absent from their biological fathers. see
http://fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-extent-of-fatherlessness/
Q The Extent of Fatherlessness
More than 20 million children live in a home without the physical presence of a father. Millions more have dads who are physically present, but emotionally absent. If it were classified as a disease, fatherlessness would be an epidemic worthy of attention as a national emergency. END Q
The epidemic of fatherlessness is the direct result of the war on poverty. The black family is “collateral damage” in this war.
I prefer this statistic.
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The Myth Of The Absent Black Father
JAN 16, 2014, 9:53 PM
Considering the fact that “black fatherhood” is a phrase that is almost always accompanied by the word “crisis” in U.S. society, it’s understandable that the CDC’s results seem innovative. But in reality, the new data builds upon years of research that’s concluded that hands-on parenting is similar among dads of all races. There’s plenty of scientific evidence to bust this racially-biased myth.
The Pew Research Center, which has tracked this data for years, consistently finds no big differences between white and black fathers. Gretchen Livingston, one of the senior researchers studying family life at Pew, wasn’t at all surprised by the new CDC data. “Blacks look a lot like everyone else,” she pointed out.
Although black fathers are more likely to live separately from their children — the statistic that’s usually trotted out to prove the parenting “crisis” — many of them remain just as involved in their kids’ lives. Pew estimates that 67 percent of black dads who don’t live with their kids see them at least once a month, compared to 59 percent of white dads and just 32 percent of Hispanic dads.
And there’s compelling evidence that number of black dads living apart from their kids stems from structural systems of inequality and poverty, not the unfounded assumption that African-American men somehow place less value on parenting. Equal numbers of black dads and white dads tend to agree that it’s important to be a father who provides emotional support, discipline, and moral guidance. There’s one area of divergence in the way the two groups approach their parental responsibilities: Black dads are even more likely to think it’s important to financially provide for their children…
https://thinkprogress.org/the-myth-of-the-absent-black-father-ecc4e961c2e8/
I read publications and websites from a number of different viewpoints. My favorite talk-show host is Rachel Maddow, about as leftist as you can get.
I prefer not to live in an echo chamber. I only learn, when I can get some diversity.
Tell me another.
Charles, Diane, and others–an interesting piece on fatherhood in the United States: https://thinkprogress.org/the-myth-of-the-absent-black-father-ecc4e961c2e8/
This piece explodes a lot of myths.
Actually, I also have students who sleep in their cars.
Please check out this website:
http://www.masonicangelfund.org/
There are many private charities, that can help.
“Governor Matt Bevin”
Governor Bill Lee… Bevin does his blessed work in neighboring Kentucky.
Thanks, Mate. A senior moment.
SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center
Friday marks the 65th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools as a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
In the ruling, the court emphasized that education was “perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” and that school desegregation was necessary for the integration of our society as a whole.
In the years that followed, federal judges held hundreds of desegregation hearings; the National Guard was deployed to protect nine black students integrating Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas; tens of thousands marched on Washington in support of integration; and Congress passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.
But our schools, in recent years, have become re-segregated. And it’s not just hurting students of color. The research is clear that it’s hurting all of us.
Our Teaching Tolerance team found that “the average black student attended a school that was 48.8 percent black and 27.6 percent white. On the flip side, the average white student attended a school that was 72.5 percent white and only 8.3 percent black.”
In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Nikole Hannah-Jones reported for ProPublica that “1 in 3 black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.”
In Charlottesville, Virginia, railroad tracks literally divide the city, with three predominantly white schools in the north and three predominantly black schools in the south.
In Mississippi, inadequate funding and inferior educational opportunities in predominantly black schools have created a racial achievement gap.
But segregation isn’t unique to the South.
A coalition of civil rights groups and students are suing the state of New Jersey over policies that require most children to attend their neighborhood schools, which has resulted in extreme racial and economic segregation. The suit argues that this segregation hurts the academic performance and personal development of all students in the public school system and perpetuates preexisting societal prejudices.
Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, spoke with our team about the issue. “Schools are more segregated today than at any time in the last 45 years. The reason that they’re more segregated is because the neighborhoods in which they’re located are segregated.”
But the impacts of residential segregation are compounded by other factors.
In New York City, 40 percent of kindergartners do not attend their local elementary school. The city has a vast network of private schools, and public school students gain admittance to schools based on performance. As a result, children are stratified by factors such as race, class and economic opportunity from an early age.
The children attending the city’s public schools are 41 percent Latino, 27 percent black and 16 percent Asian. Yet New York City’s public schools are the most segregated in the country.
Despite these troubling trends, the Trump administration has aggressively rolled back Obama-era policies designed to increase diversity in classrooms and on campuses; delayed the implementation of rules that would address racial disparities in school placement; and dismissed more than 1,200 civil rights investigations started under the Obama administration.
We cannot continue to accept the low standard of desegregation, where our classrooms and communities simply cease to be entirely homogeneous. The antithesis of segregation isn’t desegregation, it’s integration. We must create classrooms and communities that proportionately reflect the makeup of our society – and ensure equal access to opportunity for all, regardless of race or class.
We need to invest, equitably, in our public schools; end discriminatory housing policies that exclude low-income and minority families from certain communities and neighborhoods; and prioritize programs that promote diversity in our schools.
Segregation didn’t happen accidentally. We must pursue integration with the same intentionality.
The Editors
Thank you, Carol. This cannot be said enough. We have become two nations. Segregation in our schools is as bad as it has ever been, and a great gulf has opened between the poor and the wealthy.