Chronicles of a Free Lunch Kid (Part 1)

It's taken me a while to write on this topic despite my connection to it.  My hopes are that school leaders and teachers will change their perspective when it comes to the low income children they serve.  The ultimate hope is that a free lunch kid like me will hear the message.

If you are employed as a school teacher or administrator you know that low income students have been a part of school improvement conversations.  In the No Child Left Behind era it was a subgroup that you had to plan for and plan around for raising standardized test scores and for some, they are an excuse for poor standardized test scores.  Either way there is no doubt that poor kids are part of the conversation for schools.  In short, your free lunch kids can determine achievement for your school especially in areas where low income percentages are high.

Schools now have a national standard to reach in terms of standardized test achievement.  Schools work hard to bridge the gap between low income kids and middle class kids when it comes to learning.  Whole bodies of research have been developed on reaching the low achieving poor kids in schools.  After all, if we help them score better than the school building's scores go up and we save ourselves from sanctions.  The effort and training sounds like it is worth the payoff.  I'm 40 years old and I went to school in the late '80s and early '90s.  I was a free lunch kid.  I don't ever recall being reached out to and definitely didn't feel important to my school's performance but that was a different time.

I was raised by my grandmother since I was a year and half old.  Her last husband died when I was ten leaving us with just social security and disability income for five family members.  When I was ten the federal poverty line for a house of five was $13,259.  Her income was approximately $10,000.  To make up the difference we got other forms of government assistance including food stamps, a medical card and Reagan Cheese.  This is how free lunch kids are identified in school.  You live below the poverty line and/or receive government assistance.  Today that line is at $28,440.  If a kid lives in a house of five at that income level they can be one of the 31 million that are served by the national free lunch program.  This line of funding is the largest from the federal government to local school districts totaling $16 billion.

Now that we have those numbers straight, each of those kids is now part of a metric.  This percentage will determine the effort made by your school district to raise test scores.  This include training, changing teaching methods and establishing programs for the disadvantaged.  If they can improve you and other members of subgroups, like those receiving special education services, then they can enjoy prosperity in the world of school accountability.

To avoid sounding cynical and to be fair, giving this kind of attention to free lunch kids is not a bad thing.  Under NCLB, the number of children living below the poverty line was rising.  It makes good sense to address children in poverty at the same time you are emphasizing higher test scores.  My struggle with this attention is that we free lunch kids are being treated like policy and not like people.  My experience as a free lunch kid has compelled me to write about it.  In my next post I will dig into my school records to see if I fit the description of a kid that the poverty research tells us about.  Researchers tell us that poor kids suffer from lower cognitive and academic development, higher grade failure, lower attendance and are more likely to drop out.  it's time to see if the shoe fits.  Stay tuned for the next post.