CHILDREN IN CRISIS IN URBAN SCHOOLS

The schools, especially in our cities, are increasingly confronted with alarming numbers of children who bring the multiple scars of poverty, family strife, homelessness, fear, emotional problems, physical disease and substance abuse with them to school. Their world is an abomination. Its worst features stifle curiosity, disrupt concentration and suffocate creativity. Without special help they will not learn appropriately. The growing number of these children promises the makings of a national tragedy.

In noting their condition, we also strongly reject the notion that these children cannot learn or that they receive a curriculum less rich than that offered to other students.

WHEREAS, most of these children are poor. If they get to school at all, they come ill clothed and ill fed, lacking decent housing and bearing the burdens of struggling and often disrupted families. These are children more likely to suffer other disabling consequences such as ill health, adolescent pregnancy, AIDS and neglect. The longer they are poor, the more likely their school failure.

During the last 15 years, child poverty has increased and children have become the poorest of all age groups. Today there are 12.6 million of them--one in five of all American children. In central cities, 31 percent of children under six are poor. This country's child poverty rate exceeds that of any other in­dustrialized nation, amounting to nearly three times that of most of them.

Many are the babies of drug abusers, now growing up. Among these children will be those who suffer from tremors, cannot focus their eyes, are hyperactive and irritable¾apathetic one minute and aggressive the next.

Over 5 million women of child-bearing age are substance abusers. They bear over 400,000 drug-exposed babies each year, 100,000 of whom enter the world addicted to cocaine. Worst-case estimates predict that as many as 4 million of these children will be among us by the year 2000. Today drug-exposed babies constitute 11 percent of live births.

And then there are the homeless, living in shelters, make-shift temporary arrangements--even in the street. Some of them are hungry. They may also suffer from multiple infectious diseases, anemia, malnutri­tion, asthma and hearing loss from repeated untreated ear infections. They lack clothing. Their lives are unstructured, changing daily in the scramble to fashion a piecemeal existence.

As many as 1 million children under the age of 18 lack a permanent home. One study has estimated that serious developmental delays occur among 43 percent of homeless children. In many cities over 50 per­cent of the homeless population is made up of families, and more often than not these are headed by women who have two or three children under five years of age.

Many are afraid. They travel to school through drug-infested neighborhoods where murder and violence are commonplace.

In many of our cities, homicide is the leading cause of death among children. Twice as many were killed in 1988 as in 1965 when there were millions more youth in the general population. In fact, children are killing each other. By some estimates 135,000 carry a handgun to school every day.

Even in unsafe neighborhoods schools are a relatively safe haven from the physical, emotional and sexual abuse and neglect they experience at home.

The newly released report of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect estimates that "2.5 percent of American children are abused or neglected each year." This means 2.4 million cases of reported maltreatment in 1989, of which 900,000 were substantiated.

These children demand our attention because of the misery of their own lives but also because of the financial burden they will become to society. Their problems, and likely the generations of those who will follow them, affect the work agendas of virtually all the AFT's members. Those of us who work in schools, hospitals and state welfare and protective services must help them. We must lobby for needed resources. We must also work to free the delivery of these services from bureaucratic barriers.

RESOLVED, the AFT will strengthen its voice as a national advocate for children in crisis. AFT members working together¾teachers and all school employees, nurses, health care workers and state and local employees¾will make helping these children a top priority.

The AFT's efforts will include joining with others to amplify existing educational, health, social and developmental supports for these children and their families. Funding amounts and distribution formulas that are demonstrably inadequate or rigid must change. Our immediate concerns are for:

• Expanding Head Start to serve all, not just the current fifth, of eligible children. Head Start needs to be a full-day program that guarantees use of quality staff.

• Creating a federally funded comprehensive day care program for families in need in which the schools play a leading role.

• Fully funding Chapter I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and transforming it into a more flexible, preventative program aimed at the needs of the whole child. Schools with concentrations of 60 percent of these children ought to be able to devise schoolwide programs for funds use.

• Revamping and transforming Medicaid so that it provides universal protection for poor and homeless children and families.

• Maintaining child nutrition programs so that all those in need can obtain guaranteed free lunches and breakfasts.

• Devising state funding formulas that recognize the additional educational needs of cities due to either high concentrations of children in trouble.

The AFT commits itself to extending its efforts to find new solutions for these children, and in doing so, to consider programs that would:

• Enable the school to become the center of advocacy¾a flexible response agency¾for children in crisis. The school is the one institution that touches them all. It needs the resources to identify them, engage in outreach, to provide stability, to enlist the supportive services of substance abuse specialists, child protection professionals, public health and legal experts outside the school.  Some schools need professionals and paraprofessionals whose mission it is to link support services for needy students and their families.

• Create smaller schools or schools within schools and restructured programs that can build curricula and teaching tailored to reach these children in ways more likely to engage them.

• Encourage collaboration with community coalitions of business, private agencies and other organizations to focus broad-based efforts helping children become fully ready for school.

• Provide additional federal and state funds as educational supports for drug-damaged, HIV-infected, abused or neglected children and their families. Such programs should offer periodic screening and diagnosis, counseling in prenatal and maternal care, drug treatment and parent education.

• Seek to amend the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act to enable school districts to more adequately help homeless children succeed in school. Funded programs should include remediation, tutoring, before-and after-school care, counseling, transportation, medical and protective services referral and special services for those among the homeless who are handicapped, gifted and talented, and non-English speaking.

• Seek funding to support high-quality residential schools and centers for children with special needs.

• Build health clinics inside schools hosting heavy concentrations of children in crisis that would give them site-based professional diagnosis and treatment.

• Create special accelerated enrichment programs that assume the abilities of the children to perform at a high academic level.

• Enable the school to reinforce family responsibility for educational success through education-oriented incentive programs. Needy children who maintain acceptable levels of annual achievement, pass their courses every year, obey the law, stay off drugs and do not get pregnant deserve special help in the form of free post-high school college or apprenticeship training.

• Generate cooperation between boards of education, unions and police departments to seek the service supports that will create drug-free and violence-free zones in school neighborhoods.

• Find effective ways to maintain educational continuity for students who are transients, including the homeless and children of migrant workers.