Sunday, April 19, 2009
School's Out!...Forever
While flipping through the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune’s sports section looking for high school baseball scores from Saturday to see if we would move up in the rankings, I found something much more interesting. For our Privilege and Poverty unit, we brainstormed what characterizes a life of privilege. One of the characteristics we decided on was access to a quality education. I have always thought that was available to everyone through high school, because every community has a school close by that a kid has access to. That age may have passed through because in the sports section I found an article discussing an up and coming problem: school closings. This article was about Driscoll, a school that is going to close after this school year because of a trend of less students enrolling each year. Unless parents can raise a million dollars by Monday, the school will be forced to close. The smaller amount of students enrolling each year has been a trend since the economic downturn, which doesn’t give the school enough money to operate. Whether it was kids not being able to commute to school and chose a school close by or parents not being able to pay for book and other school necessities, it’s affecting Driscoll immensely. What I see as the bigger problem is that this will be taking away one of the characteristics of privilege, access to a quality education, from about 280 kids (the amount that will be attending the school next year if it doesn’t close). I believe this raises the question of should people be denied access to a privileged life because of other people’s poverty? I’m sure this will not affect some kids, because they will be able to commute to a different school. But what about the few that have parents working long hours and don’t have the time to drive them to a school farther away and the money to pay for a taxi or bus each day? Is this fair to them when they did nothing to cause the school to close? I certainly don’t think so and am interested to see if the government does anything to help situations like this, because they did with major corporations like AIG who didn’t have enough money to operate. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because I am sure there will be many more scenarios just like this one in the future.
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2 comments:
Sick chill nasty job KG.
I read the exact same article this morning, and I was personally astounded that schools closing has begun to become a trend in poorer areas like the South side of Chicago. All kids should be given the opportunity to learn and succeed in school. A good education can open a lot of doors in life, and when that is taken away, there is not much a kid can do. I was also confused that the government is not doing more to "bail out" schools under financial pressure. These kids are America's future, and our government is letting their chances to go to college and get a steady job evaporate. Hopefully somethign can be done for Driscoll, but it looks bleak for the school right now. And nice title jerk. Just kidding.
You bring up a very interesting topic here. I just blogged about how we could get the economy out of the current recession and one of the things I noted that the government should be doing is putting more money into education. This is exactly the type of problem that will prolong the recession, because more people out of school means more unemployment and less money for people, and less money being pumped into the economy. I am glad to see that this area of the economic crisis is being examined because it will highly affect future generations and especially our generation.
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