Sunday, March 07, 2010
What's the harm in a little pinch?
Luanne Rife
Recent columns
- Incentives to do business in Roanoke
- In support of informed opinions
- When values slide, rates rise
- City taxes fly through loophole
From the RoundTable blog
There isn't a day that passes that I am not grateful for the opportunities that my children and I have. We want for nothing material. Our house is sound, our bills are paid, our car works fine, our TV is a huge, high-definition wonder, our pantry is full -- despite the often voiced complaint that there isn't ever anything to eat. We live a good, solid middle-class life. If we wore blinders we could blissfully pretend that life is grand in old Virginia -- because, for now at least, it is for people like us.
It'll be OK next year, too, for people like us even if our school district closes a building or two, has larger classes and fewer electives and moves more teaching material and parental communication online. My daughters will be just fine carrying to school ink cartridges and reams of paper for extra credit. Oh sure, they might grumble if bus routes are combined, crowding their bus and forcing them out of their preferred seats. Hey, life's not only not fair, it stinks sometimes. Deal with it.
People like us can deal. People like us expect that everyone else should be just as resilient and make do with what they have. People like us who last year had furlough days and salary freezes and this year see more stagnant wages and sharply higher electric bills, say, "We cannot afford more taxes. We're living within our means. So should government."
Our new governor and our old, worn out House of Delegates have heard people like us say that sort of thing. So they won't ask us to pay one dime more when we can do without.
We can do without the state's fair share to hold down class sizes, to fund enrichment programs, to keep all our school buildings open and all our classrooms stocked with paper and textbooks, to mentor our teachers and to feed others' children breakfast.
People like us who send our kids off each morning with full bellies judge people unlike us as terrible parents for not feeding theirs. People like that shouldn't have children, or so say people like us. Why should we pay to feed them?
But people like us forget that a child shouldn't be penalized for her parents' shortcomings or misfortunes, and that a child fixated on a hungry stomach won't seek to nourish his mind.
Thanks be that there are people like Roanoke Superintendent Rita Bishop who remind us. During a recent budget meeting, Bishop spoke of the hardship imposed by weather-related school closings.
"We've had a significant number of children who have lost weight. When I make a snow call, I think about who's not going to have breakfast or lunch," she said.
People like us should read that again, then ask is this really the fat politicians speak of cutting from budgets?
People like me start thinking about the future our children will have, the society they will inherit because people like us allowed our schools to further segregate the classes -- not by grade level but by those who have and those who have not.
You see, people like us think it's really cool that we can keep up with our children's progress and assignments through nifty computer programs, and we can instantly communicate with their teachers. We can make do without workbooks when there are so many practice quizzes and games online.
But what of people unlike us? The ones without a computer and Internet access. The ones whose children can't do their homework at home, so they wait in line at the public library, sometimes until closing and past bedtime, to access one. The ones on their knees praying that library hours aren't curtailed even more.
It used to occur to people like us that our public schools and our public libraries were the two grand equalizers in our society. Through both, children from any circumstances could dare to have dreams -- and pursue them. People like us used to believe that encouraging the least among us today led to a better future for them, and therefore for us and our children -- that we as a people are only as great as our least citizen.
When did we stop being people like that?
Traud is a member of The Roanoke Times editorial board.
