The management team at Greenwood Public Library has been taking our monthly meeting on the road lately. Last month our wanderings took us to Northeast Elementary School. We have been enjoying getting to know our neighbors with these field trips and every time we learn a little bit more about the wonderful community we live in.
The staff at Northeast shared information, took us on a tour, made us some yummy snacks, and shared their favorite books, but the most important thing they did was to give faces and stories to a statistic too easily ignored: 81% free and reduced lunches.
When the Northeast school bell rings each morning, children pour through the door. Some are raring and ready to go, but others are not. Some have not eaten since they were last at school. Others are frightened or sleepy due to chaos at home. Some have language issues. But all of them are met with a veritable army of supporters. Teachers, administrators, counselors, nurses, volunteers, tutors, and neighbors work hard to make sure each child is ready to learn.
And so the work of educating a community involves more than the ABC’s – sometimes it involves food, a pair of shoes, a backpack, a listening ear, or a call to someone in the community who can help. And it doesn’t hurt that each child is treated as special and full of potential – because each one is. They are not statistics. They are bundles of joy and fear, hopes and dreams, just like the rest of us.
Most of our Management Team already knew of the good work at Northeast – our children’s librarians regularly interact with teachers and administrators there, because neither their school nor our library are defined by our four walls. But to hear these passionate educators talk about the children they serve was inspiring all over again.
For those of us who have everything we need it is so easy to forget those who do not. We all know the statistics. We know that there are those who live below the poverty line, that the percentage of free and reduced lunches is very high for areas of our community, but newspaper stories and statistics are not very compelling if they are never connected with the bright faces of promise they represent. Someone dismissed the free and reduced lunch statistic in a conversation the other day, “Oh, those free lunches are so easy to get. That statistic doesn’t mean much.” But it does. It most certainly does.
At the library we don’t have statistics to represent the needs of the children, teens, and adults who walk through our doors; but we can tell you that we have teens who are hungry and on the edge of homelessness; we have desperate parents who have been out of work for more than a year; we have children so ready to learn whose parents cannot afford preschool. Like Northeast, we work hard to make sure that our community is a level playing field for all. Teens are mentored, adults have individual help on their job search and computer classes. Children learn what they need to walk in to that first day of school ready and raring to go.
I can’t wait for our next field trip. Our community is full of people making a difference where it is desperately needed. But unless we look and are willing to truly see, we might find ourselves falling into the trap of knowing our community only by its statistics and missing the heart of the story. And Greenwood has a lot of heart!