Reflections on the Great Recession of 2008-09 (Part 2)
In the course of writing this newsletter, I have frequently reflected on those first three years teaching at Newport High School when the Great Recession pulverized many of my students. I now know through study that almost five million Americans lost their homes in that sub prime mortgage swindle/crisis and that 200 people anywhere in America would line up early in the morning for five openings at a Walmart, including Newport.
It isn't remarked on all that often in the media how the Great Recession became one of the significant causes of the contemporary homeless catastrophe. Men and women who got hollowed out by it back then never really recovered. I have served many of these men and women, now in there 50s and 60s, at the street mission and food pantry. I have overhead their stories of dislocation from that era. They weren't able to rally, along came drug abuse, deprivation and other problems, and now they are living outdoors and many are not really looking to live indoors again. I have heard them tell me that.
In the throes of the Great Recession, the Lincoln County School District created a homeless outreach position to connect students and their families to very limited resources. The district's busses began picking up students at campgrounds and budget motels. Schools started programs where students took home backpacks full of food on Fridays and returned the backpacks on Monday. I was advising the monthly Newport High Schools news magazine and we ran a regular features on homeless students. One columnist wrote exclusively on the subject. I walked my journalism students to the nearby food bank and we interviewed patrons, many of them newly homeless or about to be homeless.
The 2009-10 academic year was also when I spent $7200 of my own money on various items for my students. I know the exact figure because it was the first and only time I itemized such expenditures (in my journal). Most of the money went for power bars, fruit, candy, donuts, bagels, etc, that I stocked in my classroom. I was always the first teacher in the building and students would often arrive at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning to eat something before the free breakfast was served because they were hungry. It was during this time that I sometimes had students fall asleep in class and many of them began to look gaunt in the face, obvious symptoms of hunger.
I remember one student in particular, Dylan Huff, whose dad was a alcoholic, and had lost his job, as so many did back then. They lived in a house without insulation, power or running water. If I recall correctly, it was a house with an interior ripped down to the studs.
Dylan would routinely knock on my classroom window and I would let him in. He'd eat, drink the oceans of Yuban I poured for students, warm up, use the restrooms to wash himself, and then get on the computer to access the Internet. We didn't talk that much because he knew I had teaching work to do. He did write a poem about living in that house that winter and it was published in the school literary review. I'll never forge that poem. It was called “Colors” and it should have won a standalone Pulitzer Prize.
As I look back on my role of teacher then, I realize now that I should have had my writers dig more into the homeless/poverty issue that was all around them. It was a missed opportunity. I do hope current teachers are exploring these same issues with their students. I know I would have been. How could a teacher not?