Kay McSpadden is a high school teacher in York, South Carolina, and also a columnist for the Charlotte Observer.
In this post, she writes about the students she has taught, the difficult lives they lead, the courage they display.
Even as the kids are grappling with hard lives, the legislators in North and South Carolina are wreaking destruction on one of the few stable institutions in the children’s lives: Their school.
She writes about her students:
“In this rural school district where the majority of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, my students often write about how hard their lives are, about their parents who are absent because of work or divorce or restraining orders or death, about how poor health and homelessness and bad choices keep them from a more hopeful future.
They are not self-pitying but matter-of-fact – which is, in itself, heartbreaking.
One girl wrote that for years she worried she was also doomed to divorce because all the adults she knows – from grandparents to aunts and uncles to her parents – have separated.
“Then one day I had an epiphany,” she wrote, putting to use a word she said she had learned in an English class. “I don’t have to be like them. It was liberating, realizing that I can make my own destiny.”
Her pluck and resilience might seem remarkable except that so many of my students echo it – from the girl who was sexually assaulted as a toddler to the teenager who lost a brother to drug use. Despite catching the school bus before 6 a.m. and not getting home until 12 hours later – and despite not always knowing where they will sleep when they do – the students I know show up most days glad to be at school.”
Why do they come back day after day?
“They know that the adults there care about them – from the cooks to the principals, the custodians and the attendance monitor, the teachers and aides and librarians and secretaries and resource officers. All of us keep coming back because we make a difference in the lives of children. No one works long in education who doesn’t believe that.”
Meanwhile, back in the state capitols, the adults are making life worse for the young people:
“The governors and the legislatures of both states have decided that corporations rather than children should be their priority, and their actions prove that – cutting resources for public schools, diverting money to vouchers and charters, forcing schools to eliminate essential staff and programs, devaluing the work teachers do to improve their skills and earn advanced degrees, keeping their wages low, encouraging inexperienced and temporary teachers to rotate in and out of their school districts, evaluating teachers with invalid metrics, emphasizing standardized testing.
I don’t blame anyone for bowing out of the classroom. At some point in the future I may have to do the same.
But for now my students keep me there. Too many of them have already been let down by the adults in their lives, the ones who know them personally as well as the ones in Raleigh and Columbia who make decisions that add to their suffering. I want to be like the other committed adults who work in my school, people who make it a place where every child belongs, where every child matters.
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