AdvanceBlog

Every year, thousands of students drop out of school.

Thousands.

Within a handful of years, those thousands of dropouts evolve into hundreds of thousands.  The number of dropouts (and those under-prepared) grows so large that it loses shape, it loses humanity … it loses face.

I recently read an article about a missing boxer that provided perspective on the futility of homelessness.  A writer searched and searched for a man, who had never been announced as missing or dead.  Sometime during his ineffectual search, the writer comes to realize that he was searching for man who simply vanished.

Once while working at a church, I purchased several boxes of pancakes for our children’s choir to eat between our multiple services.  Some children are unable to grasp the significance of a free meal or the importance of not wasting food. So within an half hour after the initial rush of having pancakes had faded, I was struck with a notion to take the remaining boxes of pancakes to the homeless shelter.

That notion changed my life.

It’s amazing the magnitude of destitution one faces in a homeless shelter.  The sights, sounds, and smells converge together to intimidate one’s goodwill and attack their conscious.  Well, perhaps that only happened to me.  For every bewildered glare, every unprompted threat, and every defensive sneer, there is a story.  At some time, each inhabitant of that shelter had been someone.  Maybe someone’s daughter, son, wife, husband, mother, father, sister or brother – each of them has an identity that makes them important to someone somewhere.  Yet on that Sunday morning, huddled together in a dimly lit edifice along a street of abandoned cars and forgotten dreams, their personal uniqueness was minimally addressed by a stranger with a few boxes of pancakes.

They are evidence, tattered vestiges of the yesterday’s school-age students.  In a city where the dropout rate hovers near fifty percent, where do those dropouts go?  The factories are shrinking or have closed.  Jobs have fled and opportunities have shriveled.  So each year, those thousands of dropouts, where will they go?

Moreover, what happens in our educational system to convince someone that they would be better suited to face life without a diploma?  Were we not challenging enough?  Were we not responsive to their unique needs?  Were we so focused upon our own issues that little regard was given to those minds placed before us for shaping?  Did we overlook when their one absence became two, became ten, became a statistic?

Educators do not need another cross to bear, so this blog is not posted to spread blame.  Chances are, some of those barren faces in that homeless shelter are there due to their own devices.  However, as I hastily returned from retrieving the butter and syrup from my car only to witness that most of the pancakes had been devoured; I could not help but think that which one of them could have been a student of mine?  Who of these possess untapped potential? After they finish the pancakes, where will these people go?

Unfortunately, too many of them can never go back to the safety of a classroom.