School starts Tuesday in Concord, but a poignant lesson – about need and generosity – was already under way last week in the gym at Rundlett Middle School, at the third annual “Ready to Learn Fair.”
The goal of the volunteer effort is simple: Every child in Concord, including the most needy, deserves to start school with the basics in hand. It’s a chance, when they walk through the door that first day, to be like everybody else.
When we stopped by, excited kids scurried around, picking out brand new backpacks, pencils and crayons, notebooks, glue sticks, loose-leaf binders and dividers.
Volunteer barbers were busy providing boys and girls with the all-important “back to school haircut.”
There were new toothbrushes, bottles of shampoo and deodorant, and free vision tests, with vouchers for glasses.
Teeth were examined, vouchers for medical checkups were available and parents were signing kids up for free and reduced lunch programs.
Thirty people had lined up before the doors opened that morning; a school bus shuttled parents and kids to and from the fair from low-income neighborhoods around town.
For those in the business of helping the needy, raising awareness of the issue is job one.
Caroline Keane, one of the fair’s coordinators, first saw the need for school supplies in the tears of a sixth-grader, when the plastic bag he used to carry his books ripped open. When she reached out for support, our generous community responded. This year, $5,000 was raised. Everything is given away.
As this school year unfolds, the boost that comes with a new backpack or a haircut will fade for the vulnerable children and parents who will face hunger, a lost job or family turmoil, or a housing crisis that forces them to move from place to place. Worse yet is homelessness.
According to the state Department of Education, in 2015 there were more than 3,300 homeless students in New Hampshire – meaning they have no regular place to sleep at night. The majority (75 percent) are doubled up in shared housing or couch-surfing; 21 percent were in hotels or shelters; 4 percent were in cars, tents or sleeping outdoors.
Nearly half of these homeless kids are in middle or high school. Right now, there are more than 60 homeless students in Concord – the number has been as high as 80.
Every school in Concord has a “homeless liaison” whose job is to identify homeless students and help them stay in school. The liaison provides these students with an important connection with our community and a sense of belonging, knowing that there is an adult in the school system who knows how hard it is to learn when you don’t have the security of your own home.
This is what it really means to leave no child behind.
By federal law, if a homeless family moves, transportation is provided when it is in a child’s best interest to stay in the school where they started out. For all of these homeless students, school – teachers, friends and routines – is the stability in their lives.
Efforts are under way now to revitalize a Homeless Teen Task Force, first established by Gov. John Lynch in 2008. Estimates are that there are about 250 “unaccompanied youth” in New Hampshire, living on their own, but the number is hard to track because many of these teens stay under the radar, out of sight of the school system.
Across the country, the Department of Justice estimates more than 1.7 million teens experience homelessness every year.
In some cases, youthful determination has overcome hardship.
Since 2009, nine students who lived with homelessness received scholarships to continue their education with funds raised by the New Hampshire Coalition to End Homelessness, and matched by the Bank of New Hampshire.
The fund has a name. It is called “Hope Starts Here.”