By Carrie Coyner, Chesterfield County School Board Chair
**This piece originally ran in the Richmond Times-Dispatch opinion section on November 23, 2014
As I sat in my son’s kindergarten orientation to meet his teacher, I became flustered with the commotion around me. Here I sat, ready as a new parent to take in all of the teacher’s wisdom for this new journey, and I found myself unable to hear her. I was surrounded by parents, grandparents, aunts and siblings of my son’s classmates. Older siblings translated every word the teacher spoke, and my irritation grew as I couldn’t hear the teacher.
As I left the room, I turned back and looked around the classroom, and a flood of shame washed over me. I was so annoyed by the talking that I didn’t stop to notice that every child in my son’s class had parents who cared so much about his/her education that they all came to orientation. My son would be in a class with children whose parents wanted the best for their child, too. I smiled and walked out of the building — glancing up at the heavens, thanking God for such a place.
My children attend a Title I school with 42 percent of students receiving free/reduced lunch and about equal thirds of the school made up of white, black and Latino students. It’s a rainbow of ethnicities, socioeconomic levels, familial status and gender. I wish our school looked like this because we all live in one community together, but sadly, we do not. The busing of children from some of the poorest areas in our district to a school nestled in a middle-class neighborhood has eliminated the socioeconomic segregation that is truly what our community looks like.
Poverty is rapidly increasing in eastern Chesterfield as wealth is rising in western Chesterfield. The socioeconomic divide is growing, and our county’s policies are contributing to this divide. Our county should be having a fruitful debate about growth policies, affordable housing, how to achieve mixed socioeconomic communities, quality of housing, equitable educational opportunities and revitalization. We don’t have this debate because it’s not what you talk about at the dinner table in a “First Choice” community.
Poverty is hidden in Chesterfield. You can travel this vast land and never run across the mobile home divided into fourths with five families living under one roof. You can play soccer in the parks and never drive past the prostitute who has fallen asleep in the safest place she can find. You can eat in restaurants and never see the line of people walking along the side of a dangerous road to be fed a meal from the little Baptist church.
This divide impacts all of us: rich, poor and in between, and especially our children. Children living in poverty represent the largest group of students failing the Standards of Learning in Chesterfield. A child in poverty faces an increased risk of drug abuse, incarceration, teen pregnancy, dropping out of school and mental illness. A child in poverty is more likely to live in poverty as an adult and to have children born into poverty. It is a statistic working against every child in poverty, but we can change it and make our entire community a better place.
A low-socioeconomic student in a classroom with higher-socioeconomic students performs better than his counterparts in high-poverty schools. A low-socioeconomic student living in a community with housing and income diversity is more likely to succeed in school than her counterpart in a high-poverty segregated community. Poverty naturally decreases when we have a mix of socioeconomic levels living in proximity to the things that follow higher income levels; higher-wage jobs, quality groceries, health care, public amenities, etc., are available to everyone, and those in poverty now have the opportunity to move out of poverty based on resources around them.
We hide poverty very well in Chesterfield. There are some things we just don’t talk about. Ignorance is bliss. Poverty grows exponentially when we do nothing.
We have an opportunity to work together as a community to improve educational outcomes for all children, to improve our property values, to have lower-cost public facilities, to live together in that beautiful rainbow that is my son’s school. The first step is to sit at the table together and talk about it. I invite you to the table for a discussion Jan. 22 at Thomas Dale High School from 6:15 to 8:30 p.m. There will be a data presentation to show what is happening in Chesterfield with wealth, education, jobs and other opportunities; a discussion on why this data should matter to everyone in Chesterfield, not just those living in lower socioeconomic and aging communities; intervention strategies that are working in small parts of Chesterfield and other places; and finally, small-group discussions to discuss how we work together for positive outcomes in all of our communities.
Carrie E. Coyner represents the Bermuda District on the Chesterfield County School Board. Contact her at ce_coyner@ccpsnet.net.
VA Housing and Education 