Coming: Public Schools as Family Services Agencies
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8 responses to “Coming: Public Schools as Family Services Agencies”
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Does our plan stress the importance of teaching students reading, writing and arithmetic?
No, our plan does not even mention reading, writing or arithmetic…
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Many kids do need social services — but schools are not the agencies to provide them. They need to focus on their core mission, the greatest social service they can provide, of educating children. Nonprofit organizations like Communities in Schools provide linkages between schools and social welfare agencies. Will the state do anything more than duplicate that function?
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Mr. Sherlock has been around government long enough to know that this “plan” is a paper one that will be largely ignored. (After all, he has complained a lot in these pages about government agencies ignoring the disaster plans that are on file.) As one example, on the website of DPB, you will find “strategic” plans for each agency. A lot of time goes into preparing and reviewing those plans. Any semblance between those strategic plans and what agencies actually do is largely coincidental.
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One thing government schools have done for some time is provide meals.
Almost anyone who is alive today who went to a government school had lunch in a cafeteria, and many remember when it was free and few brought their own lunch.
Now you usually have an account and must pay for the lunch, unless you are classified as needy enough that you need not pay. For everyone else you hear occasional stories of a child denied lunch because their account is overdrawn.
But in recent years schools expanded to providing breakfast. The thought must be that a hungry child cannot learn. While that may be true, in elementary schools a child is often still eating the breakfast after the first class has started, distracting both themselves and their classmates. Schools can often fail to provide the correct number of breakfasts for each class, causing a teacher to have to run back and forth to a cafeteria to get more, or deal with sullen students who felt entitled to eat breakfast at school, but were late enough arriving that none is left.
Schools are also the distribution centers for children in families that are believed to be unable to afford to feed their young. On Fridays students may be sent home with boxed meals of processed foods for the weekend (including 3 day weekends, which are a popular feature of the government school calendar).
Before COVID I was at a school where one such needy student was in my class. Besides psychologists, reading specialists, math specialists, and English as a foreign language teachers, the school also had a social worker. One day the social worker appeared to ask me if the needy student would be in my class later. I said yes, and the social worker (a bit of a Rosa Klebb doppelganger who had once canvassed me as I ate my lunch to attempt to persuade me to vote for Elizabeth Warren in the primary), plopped down 3 days worth of packaged food on my desk. No bag or box to carry it in.
Fortunately I had various grocery bags in my desk, so the student was able to carry it home in a MOM’s Organic Market bag (a local NoVa chain). Her classmates couldn’t see exactly what she was carrying, though they did think that it was funny that a brown paper bag said MOM’s.
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You are the typical, caring teacher. You did things all day long that were not in any job description.
But the schools are each going to have to build a new wing for the new staff (and the new money) they will need to carry out the apparently limitless societal ills that the VDOE wants schools to address.
Road to Hell once again paved with the unbounded “feelings” of the left turned into public policy.
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