There is such a frustration in being powerless. We have experienced this time and time again over the last few weeks as school starts… without our kids. School started three weeks ago and I am still receiving calls in the middle of the day by children who are simply bored because their friends are in school, but they are not. Their social worker is too busy to enrol them in a school, and they need their signature as a guardian to be registered. They can’t go to school with their friends, so they won’t go at all. They are too old for their previous school, and are too scared to start a new school. Their parents won’t let them go to school. And this drives me crazy: why do I have to watch another generation grow up without basic education, especially if it is because of the passivity of the adults in their lives? I have even called social workers and parents for permission to enrol their children on their behalf: unfortunately the system doesn’t work that way. So I watch a few determined teens ferry papers back and forth between schools and parents, students who research on their own which options are available to them, make the calls, inform their social worker and wait for a day when their worker has time to come with them to sign the papers. And I want to scream.
Then there’s the flip side: our alternative education school needs an enrolment of 28 students by the end of September to receive funding. We had 30 students in the beginning of September, but last week I was called into a meeting to ensure we would make that deadline. We were only two weeks into the school year, and I am not joking when I say the following were all pressing concerns:
- One student ran away from home, was living in a crack house and started dealing cocaine. The principle scheduled a time to go look for this kid and convince him to come back to school.
- One student is on the verge of being suspended due to attendance policies. She comes every day on time, but on a regular basis sometime after lunch a 3 year old comes to the door saying she had been left alone, and this student goes home to babysit. A board member was designated to see if exceptions could be made in the policy for students making the effort to attend, but are sabotaged by parents’ carelessness.
- One student wanted to enrol, was invited in, and informed us that his brother had just shot himself in the head so today was a bad day. He’d come tomorrow.
- One student is on parole, and part of her parole is mandatory attendance at school. She still only makes it ½ the time, but her mother informs us this is the most she’s been to school in 4 years. That means she dropped out of school in Grade 3 or 4.
- A mother of two former students threatened, and is currently carrying out the threat, to deny her children of any education. Her reason? She demands her two children go to school together or not at all, but their age difference means one is in high school, the other in elementary. She won’t even home school them as she says it costs too much. Our school is currently seeing if we can find a way to make an exception for their high-school aged child to come to do correspondence at our site so they both can be back in school again.
Sometimes I feel like we really are making a difference in the community: and through Christ, we are! There are numerous students back in schools who gave up years ago because of the encouragement and support (and sometimes pressure!) from people like us. But there are times when your hands are tied and all you can do is plead God to intervene on their behalf. After all, God is all about being the hope for those kids futures: both eternally and right here in Winnipeg.
photo © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike
