“Kids who have less, need more”: The fight over school funding
A child who shows promise struggles to make it in middle school as state and national leaders debate if the country is doing enough to educate vulnerable students.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Taheem Fennell, 12, loves to ride his bike. He taught himself when he was 4 years old while visiting older cousins in Pennsylvania. He remembers running and jumping on, feeling his feet going around and testing the brakes.
“I never rode a bike with training wheels,” he says.
Taheem wants to ride his bike to the park more, but his mother worries about him venturing too far from the one-bedroom apartment in the Quaker Hill neighborhood that they share with his stepfather and four siblings, and sometimes other relatives. Earlier this year, Taheem witnessed a shooting as he was walking to school. And in the summer of 2017, Taheem’s 16-year-old sister, Naveha Gibbs, was shot and killed in a city a 20-minute drive to the north. She was with a 26-year-old man thought to be in a gang.
So Taheem spends much of his free time inside, reading. His favorite books are in the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, about a kid who’s starting middle school. Novels help him focus his mind on something positive, his mother, Charmaine Jones, says.
He started fifth grade about a month after his sister was killed. He clutched the program from her funeral in class. He had angry outbursts. The staff at Bancroft Elementary School suggested counseling, and his mother eagerly accepted the help. Taheem learned coping strategies from a family crisis therapist at the school, whom he came to trust and rely on. She taught him how to help CONTINUE READING: Can changing school funding formulas help the most vulnerable students?