DIRECTOR’S DESK | As teachers demanded stability for Oregon’s youths, GOP senators refused to make the investment
Wednesday was a day of contrasting walkouts. Brightly visible in red T-shirts, students and teachers across the state walked out into the sunlight. Oregon Republican senators, on the other hand, scurried into the shadows.
Handed the possibility of passing a bill to fund education, they opted to shut down the Senate instead, leaving the state Capitol for undisclosed locations.
After the Oregon House passed House Bill 3427, the Student Success Act, on Monday, senators left the building to avoid a quorum, stopping the bill from moving forward. This bill is designed to bring a steady source of money – about $1 billion per year – into cash-starved public schools. Businesses will pay a tax of 0.57 percent on sales over $1 million, exempting groceries, gas and hospitals.
When I watched the students march by me in their red, I celebrated how insistently visible they made themselves. How do we address homelessness not just in the moment, but in the future? Spend money on students, for one.
Decades of declining federal investment in housing and mental health services, generations of land dispossession, it all lines up next to another hard fact: One person’s wealth is another person’s dispossession. One company’s obstruction of a tax is another person’s scarcity of services.
Today’s homelessness has a history. And by that same token, today we cast our future.
The Beaverton School District is a glaring example of these tensions. The school district with the biggest budget shortfall is also the district with the largest homeless student population in the state.
Pause there. Biggest budget shortfall. Largest homeless student population. Layoffs in that district would mean fewer teachers and services for kids for whom the system already fails daily.
FURTHER READING: Six letters from Sunnyside: Student perspectives on homelessness
It is too easy to look at someone’s abject poverty and suffering and see only that. At Street Roots, we often talk about how to imagine someone’s childhood and also their future. There was a man who slept on the sidewalk, sick with alcoholism – dangerously sick. He was gripped with seizures without a drink. One day, he pointed to an African violet in our office window.
“It’s wilting,” he said. “It needs to be watered from the bottom.”
I wonder who taught him to water violets in this way. Was he surrounded by plants as a child growing up in the Willamette Valley? I recalled the linoleum counter where my grandmother in Roseburg arranged African violets under a bright light. Did he have a relative who taught him how to water them? His present is undeniably difficult; he is someone hundreds of people walk by each day, seeing only his rumpled tarp and tangled piles of clothes – his struggles of homelessness, as well as addiction.
But by imagining his childhood, I try, also, to imagine his future. I imagine an apartment lit with natural light, violets bright with health, and he, too, has that health.
We need a rich imagination of hope that allows us to imagine that people on the streets today can have a future of their choosing, the promise of their dreams.
And this rich imagination of hope also means looking at children, and doing all we can to invest in their future. Children across the state are already struggling. The extreme lack of affordable housing means too many children are unstably housed. They need stable schools, not poorly funded ones.
Homeownership and education are the two biggest wealth-builders in American society – investments that pay great gains for today’s families and future generations. But today, homeownership has slipped beyond the reach of lower-income families, and now some lawmakers seem comfortable to let a good education follow course for the sake of partisan politics. The petty comments by lawmakers against the teachers demonstrating for the welfare of students – not for higher wages – shows an insulting level of shortsightedness.
FURTHER READING: The complicated overlap of housing, health care and education in rural Oregon
This funding bill supports many key aspects of school stability – from making sure kids are fed breakfasts and lunches to operating other necessary programs. This funding will also better support mental health services for students – an area that is often short-changed. This, again, is about investing today in the future we want. In a landscape where so much about our mental health services is broken, it’s urgent that we provide those services early.
Oregon’s Legislature needs to get to work and pass this school funding bill, investing in our region’s kids, and their future.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.
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Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity.
