Teachers quietly serve as first responders to poverty
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| Collingswood High's Dennis Gaughan with Saizon Sanders, whom he has given food and clothes. Sanders returnsthe favor, teaching dance moves. (APRIL SAUL / Staff Photographer) |
At Roxborough High School in Philadelphia, teachers and staff use a school washer and dryer to clean the clothes of needy students.
Learning and laundry, in fact, get done in several area schools, where teachers and staff also buy food, prom clothes, toilet paper, eyeglasses, and countless other items for children from families with meager means.
This is on top of the hundreds, even thousands, of dollars that teachers spend each year on basic classroom supplies.
In the Philadelphia area, teachers see themselves as first responders in the ongoing emergency of poverty. Many say that if they falter, they fail the children.
So they step up.
"Children in need cross your way," said Lisa Ghaul, an occupational therapist at Knight Elementary School in Cherry Hill, who wound up adopting a student whose life was in turmoil. "If you ignore them, it's a sin of omission."
During a time of massive budget cuts, school closings, and teacher layoffs, it's easy to forget how teachers fill the holes in the lives of the poor, experts say.
"The help that teachers give kids is missing from the public dialogue about teachers these days," said Maia Cucchiara, an urban-education professor at Temple University. Teachers, she said, are too often criticized as robots teaching only to help students pass standardized tests.
"But that misses the reality of the student-teacher relationship," Cucchiara added. "When you have a child in your care and see