Healing a Child's Broken Heart

It’s always very challenging for a parent when their child has a serious health condition. It’s even more challenging when their child has a serious condition but has no health insurance to cover the needed care and emergencies. Both were true for one Texas mother whose 12-year-old daughter Evelyn was diagnosed with a heart defect. Evelyn often ended up at her school nurse’s office complaining of shortness of breath. When the nurse encouraged her mother to take her in to the doctor, Evelyn’s mother, who bakes cakes for a living, explained that Evelyn was uninsured and she couldn’t afford the specialist fees that ran into the hundreds of dollars per visit. But the nurse had attended a presentation for school district staff on the importance of connecting students to available health coverage and knew she could put Evelyn’s family in touch with an outreach worker from the Children’s Defense Fund-Texas office to help her apply for insurance.
 
CDF-Texas helped Evelyn’s mother with her application and with the critical follow up after the first application was misfiled. Once those steps were taken the family was rightfully approved and Evelyn was finally able to obtain the health care she desperately needed. Soon after she had open heart surgery to replace a non-functional heart valve. Specialists at the Pediatric Heart Clinic told Evelyn’s family she was very lucky to have had the surgery when she did. Her mother says, “It was not about luck, it was a blessing!” Evelyn’s family says they feel happy and blessed to have had help applying for health coverage when it seemed they had no hope.

Evelyn is one of millions of children whose story now has a happier ending. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Medicaid program, which together with the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) has brought the number of uninsured children to an historic low. Medicaid and CHIP provide comprehensive and affordable health coverage to more than 44 million children—that’s 57 percent of all children in America. With the new coverage options offered by the Affordable Care Act, 93 percent of all children now have health coverage.

But we can never stop working to reach children like Evelyn who haven’t yet been connected to coverage. More than 5.2 million children under age 18 were uninsured in 2013. The overwhelming majority live with working parents and are citizens. More than a third live in three states—California, Texas, and Florida. Uninsured children are more likely to be children of color, children ages 13-18, and children who live in rural areas. More than half —3.7 million—are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but not yet enrolled.


That’s why CDF continues to work, in partnership with AASA, The School Superintendents Association, to encourage school districts to help get all students the health coverage they need to learn and succeed in school. Our goal is to make school-based child health outreach and enrollment a routine and ongoing part of school district operations. The model is built around a basic question districts add to their school registration materials: “Does your child have health insurance?” Parents who answer “no” or “don’t know” are flagged and receive information from school district staff on Medicaid, CHIP, or other health coverage options. But it doesn’t stop there. Parents also can receive application assistance and often are introduced to community partners to help them successfully navigate the enrollment process the way Evelyn’s mother was connected in Texas.

CDF-Texas with its partners pioneered this technique in the Houston Independent School District almost a decade ago and since then CDF and AASA have partnered with districts in California, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, including small and large, urban, rural, and suburban school systems, serving elementary through high schools with a rainbow of  Black, Latino, Asian, and White students. Superintendents, principals, teachers, school nurses and other staff have gained a clearer understanding of the critical links between children’s health, school attendance, and ability to achieve in school. Many are now leading public education efforts to engage parents and the broader community in events geared to health and wellness. Keeping children healthy is a win for everyone.

Dr. Kavin Dotson

As Dr. Kavin Dotson, Director of Student Services for the Lynwood Unified School District in California, put it at a recent convening at CDF Haley Farm in Tennessee, “we were unaware of the fact that there were so many students in our district that did not have health insurance.” He now believes that “every school in our country is going to make a 100 percent commitment to ensure that all students are enrolled in some type of health insurance that will meet their health needs.

You too can take action now to spread the word about the importance of health coverage in your own communities with help from the Connecting Kids to Coverage national campaign. Through the end of this month it has print materials and TV and radio ads in English and Spanish that you can customize to reach parents and others assisting children. Children can enroll in CHIP or Medicaid at any time.

How frustrating it is that at the very same time we are celebrating Medicaid’s long and successful history and the recent bipartisan two-year CHIP funding extension and building on successful outreach and enrollment strategies, these critical child health programs are under attack in Congress. The fiscal year 2016 budget resolution proposes deep cuts in Medicaid and structural changes in both Medicaid and CHIP that will jeopardize their reach and make it even more difficult for many more children like Evelyn to get the coverage and care they desperately need. But there’s still time to demand that Congress stop the cuts and efforts to dismantle the structure of Medicaid and CHIP. Why would they fool around with something that is working so well for parents and children? All of us must work together to move forward not backwards to make sure all children get the health care they need to live and learn and thrive.

Criminalizing Poverty

“Held captive.” It was how one 13-year-old described the feeling of growing up poor in our wealthy nation, and for more and more Americans living in poverty, this feeling isn’t just a metaphor. The recent Department of Justice report on police and court practices in Ferguson, Missouri put a much needed spotlight on how a predatory system of enforcement of minor misdemeanors and compounding fines can trap low-income people in a never-ending cycle of debt, poverty, and jail. In Ferguson this included outrageous fines for minor infractions like failing to show proof of insurance and letting grass and weeds in a yard get too high. In one case a woman who parked her car illegally in 2007 and couldn’t pay the initial $151 fee has since been arrested twice, spent six days in jail, paid $550 to a city court, and as of 2014 still owed the city $541 in fines, all as a result of the unpaid parking ticket. The Department of Justice found each year Ferguson set targets for the police and courts to generate more and more money from municipal fines. And Ferguson isn’t alone. The criminalization of poverty is a growing trend in states and localities across the country.

The investigation of Ferguson’s practices came after the killing of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer, and last month the practice of criminalizing poverty made headlines again after Walter Scott was killed in North Charleston, South Carolina. Scott was shot in the back by police officer Michael Slager on April 4 as he ran away after being pulled over for a broken taillight. Scott had already served time in jail for falling behind on child support, and on the day he was stopped there was a warrant out for his arrest for falling behind again. His family believes his fear of going back to jail caused him to run from the broken taillight stop. His brother told The New York Times that Walter Scott already felt trapped: “Every job he has had, he has gotten fired from because he went to jail because he was locked up for child support,” said Rodney Scott, whose brother was most recently working as a forklift operator. “He got to the point where he felt like it defeated the purpose.” A 2009 review of county jails in South Carolina found that 1 in 8 inmates was behind bars for failure to pay child support. Rodney Scott remembered his brother trying to explain to a judge that he simply did not make enough money to pay the amount ordered by the court: “And the judge said something like, ‘That’s your problem. You figure it out.’”

The Institute for Policy Studies recently released a groundbreaking new reporthighlighting the policies and practices that have led to increased criminalization of poverty, and that report and similar studies are finally shining a light on the way some municipalities are criminalizing poor people just for being poor. The United States legally ended the practice of debtor’s prisons in 1833, and the Supreme Court ruled in Bearden v. Georgia (1983) that it is unconstitutional to imprison those who can’t afford to pay their debt or restitution in criminal cases, unless the act of not paying debt or restitution is “willful.” But poor people are being increasingly targeted with fines and fees for misdemeanors and winding up in illegal debtors’ prisons when they can’t pay—and in some cases, then being charged additional fees for court and jail costs. A recent investigation by National Public Radio, the New York University Brennan Center for Justice, and the National Center for State Courts cited a study estimating between 80-85 percent of inmates now leave prison owing debt for court-imposed costs, restitution, fines and fees. In some jurisdictions defendants are charged for their room and board during lockup, probation and parole supervision, drug and alcohol abuse treatment, DNA samples, and even their constitutional right to a public defender. When poor people can’t pay those fees either, the cycle of debt and jail time continues.

The private companies providing probation services in more than half of the states are some of the biggest winners when poor people are targeted. If people on probation can’t afford the fees they are charged, they breach their probation contract; this can result in more jail time, making it even less likely that they’ll be earning the money they need, and people under the supervision of these private probation companies often become liable for charges exceeding the initial cost of their ticket or fine. Federal law also prohibits people in breach of probation from receiving a range of benefits, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and Supplemental Security Income—once again, exacerbating the cycle of poverty, probation, and prison.

And state and local policies establish barriers that make it more difficult for people who have served any time in prison, including those there because they were poor, to re-integrate into society. According to a study conducted by the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section, there are more than 38,000 documented statutes nationwide creating collateral consequences for people with criminal convictions including barriers to housing, employment, voting, and many public benefits. By denying these citizens access to basic services they need to survive, our policies needlessly increase the risk of recidivism and continue to leave people truly trapped—and when we extend the cycle of poverty by criminalizing poor people, there are only a few greedy winners and many, many losers.

All in the Family

My mother was doing drugs, specifically cocaine, crack cocaine... I almost
died. They said that I was either going to be deaf or retarded or I wasn’t
going to survive past childhood or infancy because there were so many chemicals
in my system.

The odds were stacked against Britiny Lee before she was born. Her mother was addicted to drugs, like Britiny’s grandfather and many others in their poverty-stricken Cleveland neighborhood. Britiny’s mother used drugs throughout her pregnancy and went to prison for a year just after Britiny’s birth. As a poor, Black “crack baby” with an addicted, incarcerated mother and an absent father, Britiny started life in danger. Being born into an unstable poor family or to a single, teen, incarcerated, or absent parent are all known risk factors in America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crisis. The disadvantages millions of poor children and children of color face from birth along the continuum to and through adulthood—which can  include no or inadequate prenatal and health care; no or little quality early childhood education and enrichment; child abuse and neglect; failing schools; grade retention, suspension, and expulsion; questionable special education placements; dropping out of school; unaddressed mental health problems; violent drug infested neighborhoods; and disproportionate involvement in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems—cumulate and converge and funnel so many poor children of color into a pipeline and trajectory that too often leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment, and premature death. Entering the child welfare system would have been still another risk factor for baby Britiny but she was lucky. 

Watch Britiny's Story

That was where Britiny’s grandmother stepped in who already had custody of Britiny’s older brother and sister. She brought Britiny home too and Britiny says, “My grandmother stepped up to the plate to raise us because she didn’t want us to go into the foster care system.” Britiny’s grandmother didn’t have a lot of money, but she was a stable source of love and support throughout childhood and Britiny flourished in her care. Despite doctors’ concerns when she was born as a drug addicted child, Britiny was resilient and became a straight-A student who loved school from the beginning. Britiny’s grandmother was her rock even while struggling with the autoimmune disease lupus, which got worse as Britiny got older. When she was 8 years old her grandmother suffered a seizure when they were home alone together and Britiny had to call 911 and ride in the ambulance with her grandmother to the hospital. 

From then on she was terrified of losing her grandmother. Britiny’s mother Felicia, who had come in and out of her life throughout her childhood, was struggling towards sobriety. Nine months after Felicia became sober, when Britiny was 10 years old, her grandmother died. Felicia remembers the moving moment: “[My mother] held my hand and she told me, ‘Licia, I want to go home.’ And I thought that she meant go home, like put her in the car and take her home. No. She was saying she was tired and she was ready to go home to Glory... She looked at me in my eyes, and she said, ‘And God told me that you were ready, that you were ready to be a mom, that you’re going to be a good mom, that you’re not going to use drugs anymore, and that I could go.’” Britiny’s mother was finally ready to step in, regain custody, and learn how to be the parent her daughter needed and deserved. Today Britiny is a high school senior about to graduate from Cleveland’s John Hay School of Science and Medicine and dreams of becoming a cardiac surgeon. She recently received a Beat the Odds® scholarship from Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio. She says of her beloved grandmother, “She’s looking down on me. I’m sure she’s proud, and right now I just want to make her even more proud. I want to show her that she didn’t fight for me for nothing.”  

Britiny’s grandmother was one of the many caregivers raising children in “kinship care” or “GrandFamilies”—headed by grandparents or other relatives who step in when parents are unable to do so. Sometimes a child is removed from parents’ care by the state and placed with relatives in foster care; in other cases, children like Britiny are placed informally with relatives outside foster care. More than 6 million children are being raised in households headed by grandparents and other relatives. Of those 6 million, 2.5 million children are living in households without their parents present. These relative caregivers like Britiny’s grandmother are willing to care for the children, but often need financial or other help to appropriately meet their children’s needs.

A number of states have used subsidized guardianship programs to support kinship families and GrandFamilies. Kinship care has been found to help children maintain family, and oftentimes community, connections. There is also strong evidence that children placed in kinship care experience greater stability, have fewer behavioral problems, and are just as safe—if not safer—than children in non-relative care. In Britiny’s case, all of these positive outcomes came to pass, and after her grandmother “stepped up to the plate” a child who could easily have become a statistic is beating the odds and is a star with a bright future.

Stuck Outside the Poor Door

More than 88,000 people have applied to enter the “poor door” at a new luxury condominium tower on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Only one in 1,600 will win the lottery to live there. Some months ago a New York developer made headlines with the plans for this building, which takes advantage of zoning rules encouraging affordable housing by including some low-priced rental units along with the luxury condos for sale. A separate entrance for the people living in the low-income apartments continues with segregated living inside. Low-income tenants won’t be allowed to use the pool, gym, private theater, or any of the other amenities reserved for the wealthy owners. Critics immediately pounced on this design as a modern-day form of Jim Crow. But the need for affordable housing is so overwhelming that when the deadline came this month to participate in a lottery for the spots behind the “poor door” tens of thousands applied. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that most of the 219 luxury condos on the other side of the building have sold, some for more than $25 million.

The contrast between the haves and have-nots might be especially stark at that New York building, but millions of families across the country are finding themselves on the wrong side of the poor door. Housing is the single largest expense for most families and for far too many is growing increasingly out of reach. The number of families with worst-case housing needs increased from 6 million in 2007 to 8.5 million in 2011, including 3.2 million families with children, and the number of homeless public school students was 85 percent higher in 2012-2013 than before the recession.

Watch Ayriq's Story

Ayriq Sims has been one of those students. He and his siblings spent their childhood bouncing between unstable living arrangements, extended stays at relatives’ homes, and homeless shelters. Even when Ayriq’s family had somewhere to stay, he remembers all the times their lights and water were turned off, or when he went hungry because he’d made his younger siblings something to eat but there wasn’t enough food left for him to eat too. Through it all Ayriq stayed committed to excelling in school and winning an academic scholarship to The Ohio State University. But even this year, his senior year in high school and on his way to college, he found himself homeless again. Ayriq says: “I don’t want to be homeless again. I don’t want that to be who I am.”

The Children’s Defense Fund honored Ayriq with a scholarship for overcoming tremendous odds. Homelessness and housing instability can have serious, negative consequences on children’s emotional, cognitive, and physical development, academic achievement, and success as adults. Federal rental assistance, including public housing and vouchers for private rentals, helps about 5 million of the neediest low-income households afford a place to live. But because of funding limitations only about 1 in 4 needy families with children receives assistance. To add insult to injury, the Republican House and Senate budgets are proposing severe cuts to already inadequate and desperately needed housing subsidies. The White House estimates that compared to the President’s budget proposal, the Republican House budget would cut housing vouchers for 133,000 families and housing assistance for 20,000 rural families. This is on top of the 2013 sequestration cuts that led to 100,000 fewer families receiving assistance by June 2014.
 
In our Children’s Defense Fund report Ending Child Poverty Now we asked the nonprofit Urban Institute to study the impact of expanding the housing voucher program to better meet the huge need among poor and near-poor families with children who would have to pay more than half of their income to afford a fair market rent apartment. The Urban Institute found that providing enough subsidies to serve eligible families would reduce child poverty by 20.8 percent and lift 2.3 million children out of poverty — the largest impact among the nine policy improvements we proposed in our report. More than 2.5 million more households would receive a subsidy, worth an average of $9,435. We could easily pay for this housing subsidy expansion by making fairer and common sense reforms to close corporate accounting tax loopholes, saving $58 billion a year. Or if we had more responsible and more just members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, instead of repealing the estate tax which amounts to a $27 billion a year giveaway to the 5,400 ultra-wealthy estates worth over $5.4 million — in the top two-tenths of 1 percent — as the Senate and House both voted to do, we could invest the $24 billion a year needed to ensure poor and near-poor children a chance to grow up in a stable place to call home.

Instead of making extraordinary students like Ayriq struggle to beat the odds every day we should be taking common sense and essential steps like this to change the odds. The stories about the tens of thousands of people seeking entry in New York’s “poor door” are an urgent reminder of the need for more affordable housing across our country. Cutting back on already inadequate help to those most in need to give more tax welfare subsidies to those least in need is not the answer and is profoundly unjust. Families should not have to win a lottery to live in segregation just to get a roof over their heads.

Thank God for Peanut Butter and Jelly Day

Kaylyn Sigman is a high school senior with big plans. A star soccer player from a poor rural Appalachian Ohio community who loves calculus and creative writing, she's college-bound this fall and dreams of becoming a middle school special education teacher. Kaylyn's overcome a lot to arrive where she is today. Her parents' relationship was rocky throughout her childhood, and they finally divorced when she was 10, leaving Kaylyn's mother alone to raise her, her younger sister, and her two younger brothers, who were adopted. Her mother, who suffers from seizures, worked as a labor and delivery nurse but is now on disability. Both brothers have special mental health needs, and Kaylyn, a bright student who skipped second grade and was reading at the ninth-grade level in third grade, has ADHD, all leading to an ongoing pile of medical appointments and bills. After her father left, Kaylyn's family struggled in poverty, moving seven times in four years, trying to find an affordable place to stay. Kaylyn's mother says that when they lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) benefits last year, their family never would have survived the toughest times without PB and J Day, held once a week during the summer months at the children's school thanks to the local County Children's Services Agency. They'd come home with enough bread, peanut butter and jelly for each family member to have one sandwich for three meals a day until the next pickup.

Kaylyn is one of five inspiring high school seniors whom the Children's Defense Fund (Ohio) is honoring this month with a Beat the Odds^® award and college scholarship. But millions of other children continue to go hungry every day in our wealthy nation. Some aren't even lucky enough to be able to count on peanut butter sandwiches to get them through. What do those hungry families do?

SNAP helps feed 21 million children -- more than one in four children in our nation. SNAP prevents children and families from going hungry, improves overall health, and reduces poverty among families that benefit from it. The extra resources it provides lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty in 2013. It's the second most effective program for rescuing families from poverty, and the most effective program for rescuing families from deep poverty. SNAP doesn't just keep a child from going to school or bed hungry but has long-lasting effects. Research shows that children with access to food stamps are less likely to experience stunted growth, heart disease, and obesity by age 19 and are nearly 20-percent more likely to complete high school. And SNAP's positive effects extend beyond individual children and families to entire communities. During a recession, the impact of SNAP's economic growth is estimated to be from $1.73 to $1.79 for every dollar of benefits provided. In short, SNAP works. It's critical that SNAP be improved and expanded, not cut as proposed under the House and Senate Republican proposed budgets.

Although we know cuts to SNAP would mean millions of children might lose benefits and be more likely to go hungry and suffer the long-term negative impacts of hunger, and despite the fact that every major bipartisan budget commission has said that SNAP should not be cut, that's just what current Republican budget blueprints in the House and Senate are proposing. Worse, the House budget plan would block grant SNAP and cut its funding by $125 billion -- more than a third -- from 2021 to 2025. The Senate budget doesn't provide enough detail to tell exactly how SNAP would fare, but it cuts non-health entitlement programs serving low- and moderate-income people -- which includes SNAP -- by 24 percent.

SNAP benefits now average less than $1.40 a person a meal, and as critical as they are, they're not enough for many low-income families like Kaylyn's. In 2013, 54 percent of families receiving SNAP were still food-insecure, and overall one in nine children in our nation didn't have enough to eat. During the recession Congress recognized that SNAP benefits were too low for many and increased the value of the maximum benefit by 13.6 percent. The impact was powerful: Some 831,000 children were kept out of poverty in 2010 as a result of the change. But Congress ended that increase in November 2013. Further slashing SNAP benefits now will cause even more children to go hungry, push families deeper into poverty, and have negative repercussions for the entire nation.

There are many other choices. The Children's Defense Fund's recent Ending Child Poverty Now report shows that increasing SNAP benefits by 30 percent would decrease hunger for 12.6 million families with children, and that the added resources would lift 1.8 million children out of poverty, reducing child poverty by 16 percent. Families like Kaylyn's need more help, not less -- and it's not too late for our leaders on all sides of the political aisle to do the right thing. In a nation where millions of working families still can't earn enough to pay rent, pay the bills, and put food on the table at the same time -- and where in fiscal year 2013 there were 4.9 million households with no income but SNAP, including 1.3 million households with children -- relying on the charity of PB and J Day is not a substitute for justice. Tell these leaders seeking to make already hungry children hungrier that they should instead cut the $38 billion from the defense budget that the Pentagon did not ask for and restore the $269 billion in lost revenue from the repeal of the estate tax that only helps the wealthiest two tenths of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. It boggles my mind to try to understand such skewed moral values and lack of understanding that the real security of our nation is in the minds and bodies and education of our children.

Big Winners and Big Losers in the House and Senate Republican Budgets

"A budget is a moral document; it talks about where your values are." – Representative Rob Woodall (R-GA) discussing the House Budget Committee’s FY2016 Proposal

"There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children." — President Nelson Mandela

In the House and Senate budget proposals for fiscal year 2016, passed with only Republican votes at the end of March, there are big winners and big losers. The big winners are defense spending and contractors and very wealthy people and powerful special interests. The big losers are children, our poorest group in America, and struggling low- and middle-income families trying to stay afloat in our economy.

Very big winners: Defense spending and contractors. The House and Senate Republican budgets add $38 billion more in defense spending above the Pentagon’s request in fiscal year 2016. Instead of being up front and including it in the regular defense department budget, it was added to a catch-all war fund not subject to budget caps. This is a budget gimmick some conservatives have decried as deceptive and fiscally irresponsible. The $38 billion additional defense spending could provide 2.5 million subsidized jobs to poor families with children lifting 1.2 million children from poverty; and double the Head Start program, which serves only 40 percent of children who need it, for one year. The House Republican budget goes much further adding $387 billion in defense spending between 2017-2025. This amount could lift 60 percent of our children out of poverty for five years. 

Very big winners: Very wealthy people. People making more than $1 million a year would get a $50,000 average tax cut from the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) in the House budget. The overall taxpayer loss would be more than $1 trillion in revenue over 10 years. The Senate budget includes a last-minute amendment to repeal the estate tax, which benefits only the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans with estates worth over $5.4 million for an individual or $10.9 million for a couple. An estimated 5,400 wealthy estates would save $2.5 million each with a taxpayer loss of $269 billion dollars between 2016-2025. This morally indefensible government giveaway for super rich people could provide housing subsidies for 10 years for 2.6 million poor and near-poor families with children struggling to find a place to live and reduce child poverty by 21 percent; or pay for the President’s $80 billion proposed investment for child care subsidies for all low-income children under 4 and $75 billion for quality preschool for low-income 4 year olds and extend through 2025 Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit improvements that keep 1 million children out of poverty. 

Very big losers: Vulnerable children and low- and middle- income families. Under the guise of balancing the budget and cutting the deficit, recklessly unjust massive cuts of more than $3 trillion over 10 years will undermine lifelines of stability and hope. The House and Senate Republican budgets will cut programs for those who need help most and increase government welfare for those who need help least.

Very big losers: The millions benefiting from health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Both Republican budgets seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination against 129 million children and adults with pre-existing health conditions, helps over 5 million uninsured 18-26 year olds now covered under parental insurance plans, and extends coverage for some foster care youths to age 26. More than 10 million near poor adults in twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia will lose Medicaid coverage received under ACA. The House budget also proposes to block grant Medicaid, merge CHIP into it, and make deep cuts that will reverse the progress made in reducing the rate of uninsured children by almost half since the late 1990s. 

Very biggest losers: America’s future, dream and struggle to become a more just nation. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 that “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values . . . A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies . . . A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth . . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” A year later—and 46 years ago this week—Dr. King was assassinated. At his death he was urgently calling for a Poor People’s Campaign to end poverty in the world’s largest economy. How disappointed he would be to see us continue to take from the poor to give to the rich, the rising and huge wealth and income inequality gaps, the bloated military budgets and 45 million poor Americans including 14.7 million poor children in our midst. 

These Republican budgets do not meet the test of the gospels and the prophets or America’s professed commitment to being a fair nation. These morally repugnant budgets would move us backwards. I hope every American will break their silence and demand better fairer leadership from these leaders beginning with just treatment of the most vulnerable among us.

Let's Give Child Hunger a Summer Vacation

Many children and families eagerly look forward to the end of the school year and the carefree days of summer, playing outside in the warm sun, splashing and swimming in pools and at beaches, and gathering with family and friends for backyard barbeques. But for more than 17 million children the end of school can be the end of certainty about where and when their next meal will come. While 21.7 million children received free or reduced-price lunches during the 2013-2014 school year, only 2.6 million children—12.2 percent—participated in the Summer Food Service Program. This huge participation gap suggests that nearly nine out of 10 of the children who benefit from free or reduced-price lunches during the school year may not be receiving the nourishment necessary for proper physical, cognitive, and social development during the long summer months. Hunger has no vacation.


The good news is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service operates the Summer Food Service Program that is administered by state agencies to serve these hungry children. Although the program is 100-percent federally financed and can create desperately needed summer jobs for cafeteria workers and others, there is still a severe shortage of school and community programs to serve all needy hungry children. And there are other barriers. Summer food programs sometimes tend to be available at odd hours and for short periods of time and in inconvenient places, making it challenging for children to get there, a problem exacerbated by lack of safe transportation to the sites.


Over the last few years, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service has been piloting innovative strategies in diverse communities across the country to help overcome many of these barriers. Some programs have had success using mobile vans to provide meals, which is especially helpful in rural communities. In other communities without sites, it has allowed the use of electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards—like those used for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC)—to transfer money to families so they can purchase extra food for their children in the summer. A 2012 evaluation of the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children demonstration found that a $60-a-month-per-child benefit reduced the percentage of children experiencing “very low food security,” the USDA’s most severe measure of food insecurity, by one third and helped reduce food insecurity in the household. Sites in Arizona, Kansas, and Ohio in 2011 and 2012 participated in a demonstration program, providing weekend and holiday meals in backpacks for children in the Summer Food Service Program when the program was not serving meals. These sites saw substantial increases not only in the number of meals served but also in average daily attendance rates.


Congress has a role to play in ensuring that countless children do not go hungry during the summer. The Summer Meals Act of 2015 (S. 613) was introduced by Sen, Kristen Gillibrand (D-New York) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) both this year and last. Their bill would significantly expand summer nutrition programs by lowering the threshold for community eligibility from 50 percent to 40 percent of children in the area eligible for free or reduced price meals. Community eligibility reduces the administrative burden on sites and allows them to serve more children. The bill also simplifies the administration of the program for sponsors, provides funding for transportation grants, and allows sites to serve a third meal. The Stop Child Summer Hunger Act of 2014 (S.2366), introduced by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Rep. Susan Davis (D-California) (H.R. 5242) in the last Congress and expected to be reintroduced in the current Congress, would make permanent the successful EBT demonstration project piloted by the USDA, providing $150 EBT cards for families for the summer for each child eligible but without access to a summer food site.


There has been progress, but it must be increased so children do not suffer hunger. USDA data show that between July 2013 and July 2014, the number of children participating in the Summer Food Service Program increased by more than 220,000, and 11 million more meals were served to hungry children. Our friends at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) note in their annual report on summer meals that during this same time period, the number of sponsors and sites across the country also increased. However, while improvements have been made to reduce the participation gap, millions of children continue to go hungry during the summer months. I find it shocking that in 2012-2013, 4.9 million households, including 1.3 million with children, an increase from the previous year, had no cash income and depended only on food stamps (now called SNAP) to stave off hunger. I find it even more shocking that some Republican leaders are trying to cut SNAP when the need is so enormous. 


There is a role for all of us in getting food to children during the long food desert of summer months for millions of young children, and right now, we still have time to take action for the coming 2015 summer. I will begin by reaching out to U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and asking him to contact school superintendents all across the country to ask them about steps they are taking to ensure that none of their children goes hungry during the long summer months, and to request a report back. I hope you will do the same with your local superintendent. Find out how you can help—or how at-risk children you know can fully participate in sites already planned for the summer.


Individuals and organizations in communities can help serve the meals, promote the program, provide transportation, volunteer at summer food sites, and help find sponsors. The USDA has a number of great resources to help sponsors and sites get up and running, including a “Summer Meals Toolkit” that provides information on sponsors, sites, links to state agencies, and much more. And if you know hungry children in your community, you can call 1-866-3-HUNGRY or 1-877-8-HAMBRE to find the nearest summer feeding site. Most importantly, if there are not enough summer feeding sites, ask why not. Urge your schools, congregations and other local programs to continue serving children during the summer months and take advantage of the opportunity to use federal dollars to do it. We are happy that this summer, the nearly 13,000 children at our Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools^® summer program sites in 28 states and the District of Columbia will get not only food for their bodies, some with support from the Summer Food Service Program, but food for their minds to stop summer learning loss. Let us work together to give hunger a summer vacation and help all children have a more joyful vacation.

Time for Justice for Children in New York

Co-authored by Melanie Hartzog, Executive Director, CDF-New York
Under New York’s juvenile justice system a child as young as 7 can be arrested for a crime, and a 16-year-old is automatically charged as an adult.

These laws are shockingly behind the times — bad for children and bad for public safety. New York is one of only four states to create a juvenile jurisdiction for little children who are barely old enough to shed their baby teeth and still believe in the tooth fairy. And they are expected to have the cognitive development necessary to participate in and understand a trial?

New York is one of only two states to ignore the latest neurological research underscoring the fact that 16- and 17-year-olds are still children developmentally. Their brains will not be fully formed until age 25, and they lack the ability to control impulsive behavior by focusing on its consequences.
This key developmental period is an important opportunity for rehabilitation. Research shows that adolescents are highly receptive to change in a way that adults are not. They respond very well to proven interventions and with them can learn to make more responsible choices.

Ignoring evidence-based interventions proven to reduce recidivism and continuing to ship teens off to crime school (adult prison) are mistakes we can’t afford to keep making. In adult prisons, youths are more likely to suffer physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and be molded by other prisoners, often hardened career criminals. Studies have found that youths in the adult criminal justice system are 36 times more likely to commit suicide and are rearrested 34-percent more often for felony crimes than their peers in the juvenile justice system.

This sobering fact, that automatically charging 16- and 17-year-olds as adults makes them more likely to commit violent crimes, is proof that this policy is a threat to public safety. The evidence shows that children should be treated as children, particularly since these teen arrests are overwhelmingly for nonviolent crimes like shoplifting, turnstile jumping, or drug possession. The racial disparities in policing youths of color (over 70 percent of the children arrested and 80 percent of the children sent to prison statewide are Black and Latino) compound the harm that these unfair laws are inflicting on our children and communities.

Earlier this year, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo included recommendations from his Commission on Youth, Public Safety & Justice in his 2015-16 executive budget. His proposal raises the minimum age of juvenile jurisdiction from age 7 to 12 (age 10 in rare cases of homicide). It also raises the overall age of juvenile jurisdiction to 18 and broadens the list of eligible circumstances in which young offender status can be assigned to age 21. Importantly, this means that 16- and 17-year-olds would never again be housed with adult criminals. Instead, the justice system would focus on proven services and interventions that the most current research has demonstrated result in better outcomes for youths and reduce recidivism and keep communities safer from violent crime.

CDF’s work to raise the age in New York builds on our early work to keep children out of adult jails — recognizing inhumane conditions and great harms to children. In the foreword to our 1976 report "Children in Adult Jails," Judge Justine Wise Polier, the state of New York’s first woman judge, who presided in New York City’s family court for 38 years and at the time was the director of CDF’s Juvenile Justice Division, chided states that continued to prosecute and jail children in the adult criminal justice system: “It has been over three-quarters of a century since states began to legislate that children should be treated as children.”
Today New York and North Carolina are the only two states left that automatically treat children as adult criminals, but how pleased Judge Polier would be that Gov. Cuomo has put forward a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to juvenile justice reform that would change that. Now is the time for the New York state legislature to join him by adopting this important, long-overdue change. Then North Carolina, as the last outlier, should join the rest of the states in seeking justice for children.

Don't Leave Children Short

Congress is about to strike a deal that takes care of seniors and doctors but leaves low-income and “at-risk” children short. Congress’ annual struggle to avoid cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates so physicians will continue to give seniors the care they need is widely considered must-pass bipartisan legislation. Known as the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) or “doc fix,” this annual process often provides a vehicle for moving other legislative health priorities. (Last year it included one year of funding for the important Maternal and Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting program.) While Congress has long discussed passing a permanent “doc fix,” leaders in the House of Representatives have now released an outline for doing it and plan to act on it next week. They hope the Senate will follow and act before the current “doc fix” expires March 31.
This is great news for seniors whom we support, but why is Congress leaving children behind by extending funding for the successful bipartisan Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and the Maternal and Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program for only two years? The cost of the “doc fix” is about $140 billion, while a two-year extension of CHIP and home visiting funding is less than $6 billion. Yet in the House proposal this increase required an “offset,” meaning it had to be paid for, while the “doc fix” that is more than 20 times more expensive does not. This is profoundly unjust to children whose lives are equally important.

A clean four-year CHIP funding extension and four years of funding for home visiting must be included in any final “doc fix” package. Certainly the price tag is not the obstacle. Funding for CHIP and home visiting for four years is expected to add up to less than $12 billion to serve millions of vulnerable children, a critical investment in the health of lower-income children.

Today, more than 8 million children depend on CHIP for health coverage. Together with Medicaid, CHIP has played a vital role in bringing the number of uninsured children to the lowest level on record. Simply put, CHIP is a bipartisan success story. But if funding is not extended quickly, up to 2 million children could become uninsured, and millions more would have to pay significantly more for less-comprehensive coverage. This would reverse the progress made over the past two decades and create a health coverage gap among children in working families. The vast majority of governors, both Democrats and Republicans, share our concerns about CHIP funds expiring abruptly. They are concerned about higher costs and inadequate benefits for children, budget challenges to cover children without CHIP, and an increase in uninsured children if CHIP funding ends.

The Children’s Defense Fund strongly supports a clean four-year extension of CHIP through 2019 because:

• The new health insurance exchanges need at least four years to make changes to ensure children have comparable pediatric benefits with costs to families no higher than in CHIP today. It is highly unlikely these improvements will be enacted and implemented by 2017.
• CHIP coverage saves money for states and the federal government. It is more efficient than private health insurance, costs less than subsidized exchange coverage and provides the comprehensive coverage that gives children and families access to the pediatricians, specialists and special facilities children need.

Four years of funding for the Maternal and Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting program is also a bargain. It brings quality home visiting to children and parents in every state and the District of Columbia and has bipartisan roots. Quality voluntary home visiting programs implement a two-generation strategy in which preschool children under age 5 and their parents benefit by being connected to community resources. MIECHV will end March 31 if funding is not extended. A four-year extension will allow states to expand their programs and reach many more children.

Rigorous research studies have found that quality, evidence-based home visiting programs produce measurable, long-term outcomes for children and families, including better health; greater school readiness, academic achievement, parental involvement, and economic self-sufficiency; and reduced child maltreatment, abuse, and juvenile delinquency.

Almost 80 percent of families participating in the MIECHV program had household incomes at or below 100 percent of the federal poverty line. As in CHIP, where states have flexibility to craft their programs, states that receive MIECHV funding can tailor their programs to serve the specific needs of their communities but have to meet certain benchmarks. Four more years of funding will enable important progress in meeting those benchmarks.

Congress must stop playing politics with children and pass four more years of funding for CHIP and MIECHV as part of the “doc fix” package if millions of children are not to be left with uncertainty and at greater risk. We need to ensure our children are healthy, supported, and strong if they are going to be able to support our growing number of seniors in the future. Congress must commit to this small but extremely important investment. About 30 years ago, CDF, AARP, the National Council on Aging, and the Child Welfare League of America established Generations United, an energetic organization today committed to improving the lives of children, youths, and older adults through intergenerational collaboration, public policies and programs for the enduring benefit of all. Its motto is “Stronger Together.” Four years of funding for both CHIP and MIECHV will help strengthen our children and help them support our older and aging generations.

Staying on the March

Fifty years ago I traveled from Mississippi to Selma, Alabama on March 21^st, 1965 to join Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands of fellow citizens marching the 54 miles to the steps of the state’s capitol in Montgomery. Millions of Americans now know about this march thanks to the movie Selma and the recent 50^th anniversary celebration. Selma was the site of a courageous voting rights campaign by Black citizens which was met by brutal Southern Jim Crow law enforcement and citizen violence. The nation was shocked two weeks earlier when John Lewis and Reverend Hosea Williams set out on a nonviolent march with a group of 600 people toward Montgomery to demand their right to vote and were brutally attacked by lawless state and local law enforcement officials at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The televised images of “Bloody Sunday” and the savage beatings of the marchers—including Congressman Lewis whose skull was fractured—were a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement and in America’s struggle to become America. It provoked the thousands of us (ultimately about 25,000) who came together later to finish the march, safer thanks to Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.’s order that we had a right to peaceful protest and with National Guard protection. And we were buoyed by President Johnson’s March 15^th, 1965 address calling on Congress to pass what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In that speech—“The American Promise”—President Johnson said: “This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: ‘All men are created equal’—‘government by consent of the governed’—‘give me liberty or give me death’... Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man... To apply any other test—to deny a man his hopes because of his color or race, his religion or the place of his birth—is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.”  President Johnson also said: “Should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.”

Fifty years later, speaking at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, President Obama echoed the same themes: “[Selma is] the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents... These are not just words. They’re a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny.” He added: “The American instinct that led these young men and women to pick up the torch and cross this bridge, that’s the same instinct that moved patriots to choose revolution over tyranny. It’s the same instinct that drew immigrants from across oceans and the Rio Grande; the same instinct that led women to reach for the ballot, workers to organize against an unjust status quo; the same instinct that led us to plant a flag at Iwo Jima and on the surface of the Moon. It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America. That’s what makes us unique.”

The first Selma march was planned not only to gain the right to vote but to protest the tragic death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black church deacon and military veteran killed in Marion, Alabama when he, his mother, sister, and 82-year-old grandfather attended another nonviolent voting rights demonstration where marchers were brutally attacked by racist Alabama law enforcement officials who broke it up. Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and beaten trying to shield his mother from a police nightstick. What a terrible irony that in this year of celebration of the Selma marches we are witnessing the resurgence of overt law enforcement brutality and injustice in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York City, and elsewhere, reminding us how far we still have to go. The continuing protests against unequal justice under the law by those enjoined to protect all of us and all of our children after the deaths of teenager Michael Brown, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, and others are a wake-up call about the deeply embedded systemic racism still alive in America. Each of us has a responsibility to root it out and stop it in its tracks.

Each American must remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society. Each of us has a personal responsibility to be decent and fair and insist that others be so in our presence. Don’t tell, laugh at, or tolerate racial, ethnic, religious, or gender jokes—or any practices intended to demean rather than enhance another human being. Walk away from them. Stare them down. Make them unacceptable in our presence and in our institutions. Through daily moral consciousness each of us has a responsibility to counter the proliferating voices of racial and moral and ethnic and religious division that are regaining respectability over our land. Let’s face up to rather than ignore our growing racial problems which are America’s historical and future Achilles’ heel unless addressed firmly and courageously.

As Dr. King spoke to us at the end of the exhilarating Selma to Montgomery March he reminded us that we weren’t done: “Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream. Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past... Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat... Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congressmen who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”

And let us all stand up right now to all those in our Congress, statehouses, and across our country who are trying to take away and suppress the right to vote and who are refusing to honor the sacrifice of all those who died to gain this fundamental American right. Shame on them and shame on us if we don’t act to insist that Congress renew the Voting Rights Act without a minute’s more delay. And shame on us if we do not stand up to all those who seek to turn the clock of racial progress backwards by denying equal justice under the law for all. We still have so far to go in our march to make America America—but we must march forward and never backwards.

Who Are We? What Do We Americans Truly Value?

Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now is over $800 billion dollars a year... if we judge the United States of America by that... Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. --Senator Robert F. Kennedy

What do we stand for as a nation and who do we wish to be? In a 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, Senator Robert Kennedy correctly worried too many used our nation’s wealth as the standard of greatness rather than the human values that should matter most. Our Gross Domestic Product — now $17.7 trillion — includes many things for us not to be proud of. So we should ask ourselves how well America is doing on the things that should matter most—the well-being of our children and families and the quality of justice and life in our communities and nation?

Among high-income countries the United States ranks first in Gross Domestic Product and first in the number of billionaires, and second worst in child poverty rates – ahead only of Romania whose economy is 99 percent smaller than ours. It is a national disgrace that children are the poorest group of Americans with 14.7 million living in poverty.

We are first in military spending — $11.1 billion a week — and first in military weapons exports.

We are first in the number of people incarcerated and worst in protecting our children against gun violence. A Black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate. Children and teens in America were 17 times more likely to be killed by gun violence than those in 25 other high-income countries combined.

We are 30^th in preschool enrollment rates and 17^th in reading, 23^rd in science, and 31^st in math scores for our 15-year-olds. Nearly 60 percent of all fourth and eighth grade public school students in the U.S. and more than 80 percent of Black and almost 75 percent of Latino children in those same grades could not read or compute at grade level in 2013.

We rank first in health expenditures but 25^th in low birth weight rates, 26^th in child immunization rates, 31^st in infant mortality rates, and second worst in teenage births – just ahead of Bulgaria.

If we compare Black child well-being in America to child well-being in other nations, the U.S. Black infant mortality rate exceeds that in 65 nations including Cuba, Malaysia, and Ukraine. Our incidence of low-birth weight Black infants is higher than in 127 other nations including Cambodia, the Congo, and Guatemala.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child spells out the basic rights children should have everywhere and is the most widely and rapidly ratified international human rights treaty in history. For years the United States and Somalia, which had no recognized government, were the only United Nations members that had failed to ratify the convention. In January 2015 Somalia became the 195^th nation to do so. The United States now stands only with new U.N. member state South Sudan as the two countries that have not ratified it — and South Sudan has started working towards ratification.

The United States stands alone, despite recent progress, in still permitting life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders who were under 18 at the time of the offense. The U.S. Supreme Court has banned capital punishment for crimes committed by juveniles but America remains one of 58 nations that continues to use capital punishment for adults. In 2013 the U.S. had the sixth highest number of executions — after China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea.

If America wants to be a truly great nation on the world stage, it’s time to redefine the measures of our success. The litmus test I propose is that of the great German Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed for opposing Hitler’s holocaust, who said “the test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.” The great South African president Nelson Mandela agreed with him and believed “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” On the Bonhoeffer-Mandela measure of success, we must do much, much better.

'Make Me a Woman'

One of my sheroes is Sojourner Truth. A brilliant but illiterate woman, she was a great orator and powerful presence who possessed great courage and determination. I often wear a pendant with her image and words: “If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.” An unwavering defender of women’s rights and an abolitionist, Sojourner continues to fuel my determination to fight for equality for women, people of color, and children left behind. She was born into and lived nearly three decades in slavery but dedicated her life to combating slavery and gender inequality and second-class citizenship. She never gave up talking about or fighting for justice and equality.
Sarye Huggins is a high school senior who knows her Black history and has also been inspired by Sojourner Truth. Read a few lines from her spoken word poem “Make Me a Woman”:

Make me a woman in this world of poverty and deceit. They'll know I’m a woman by the sounds of determination coming from my feet. ... Just make me a woman.  Don’t you think the time has come? I can hear my ancestors summoning me by the sounds of their drums. A woman, me? Imagine that. Once you grant me this wish, I’m never turning back.

She also writes that she knows “strong women run through my blood”—but her journey towards becoming a strong, confident young woman has not been easy.
Sarye lives in Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, a community disproportionately plagued by poverty and violence. Her teacher explains, “She’s survived ‘Bed-Stuy, do or die’—that’s the motto of our neighborhood.” Sarye’s mother, a teacher, died from a brain tumor when Sarye was 2. Her father was frequently part of her early life, and she was raised by a beloved aunt. As a smart, shy girl attending some of the poorest and roughest schools in New York City, Sarye didn’t always feel she fit in. Although she won awards in elementary school for being an outstanding student, she also endured a lot of teasing and bullying from her peers and harbored much of the pain inside. In middle school things got worse when her father stopped calling and visiting. For the first time her grades started slipping, causing her to lose her confidence, and she began trying desperately to change herself to gain acceptance by her peers. When the inner turmoil reached a breaking point, she started cutting herself and described some of the pain she was feeling in another poem:

I didn’t want to be smart anymore. I was no longer myself. I got angry, and placing blades to my skin just did not help. I knew that what I was doing to myself wasn’t a felony, nor was it a crime, but at the same time I didn't realize that I was just destroying my heart, my soul, my body, and my beautiful mind.

The odds were stacked against Sarye, as they are against so many of our Black girls and boys today. Black children are the poorest children in America; every other Black baby is poor, and every two minutes a Black baby is born into poverty in our wealthy nation. Black children are less likely to live in two-parent families, are more likely to be abused or neglected or enter foster care, and suffer worse health outcomes than white children. Black students fall behind in school early and do not catch up; more than 80 percent of fourth- and eighth-grade Black public school students cannot read or compute at grade level, and a Black high school student drops out every 33 seconds during the school year. Black children and youths are at greatest risk of being funneled into the prison pipeline and are at highest risk of gun violence, the leading cause of death among Black children and teens ages 1 to 19. For many of the children in Sarye’s neighborhood, these odds have already proven too much.
Sarye was blessed by her aunt’s unfailing support, and by caring teachers who began nurturing her potential during her freshman year of high school . She says, “They just saw something in me that I didn’t even really see in myself at the moment, and I think that’s what I really needed.” After Sarye attended the Summer Bridge Program at Boys & Girls High School, her English teacher recommended she apply for the Smart Scholars Program, which would allow her to take classes at Long Island University beginning in 10th grade. She surprised herself by testing into college-level English during the entrance exam. Though still in high school, she’s maintained a 4.0 in her college classes while excelling in her high school courses. Unsurprisingly, English has remained one of her strengths—and she’s embraced writing as a way of expressing some of the feelings she struggled to hide inside. From her poem “I’m Free From It”:

I didn't have to hide behind the bars of shame, hurt, or declaration. I could build on the things that were given to me and renovate the parts that were taken. My dreams that were deferred had me shaken up, but only to produce a better me in the making. ... I can look in the mirror and smile, embracing all my scars, marks, and imperfections, perfectly imperfect, not stressing to make the perfect impression, not ashamed, scared, nor confused because I am who I am for a reason.

Sarye is one of five extraordinary high school students the Children’s Defense Fund-New York will honor next week for beating the odds. A scholarship will help ease their way on the path to college. She knows she’s already made great strides and says, “I feel like allowing people to actually help me and to influence me to do better is what saved me.” What a privilege it is to help young people like Sarye become the strong Black women and men they want to be. All of us must change the odds and help all of our Black girls—and boys, and all children—become the strong and contributing adults they want to be and we need them to be as we look at the security of future generations and our nation.

No ESEA Bill Is Better Than One That Fails to Protect the Poorest Children

For fifty years Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) has been the primary source of federal funding targeted to schools to serve poor children. Its purpose has been to raise achievement for poor children through extra support to their schools to help meet their greater educational needs. Sadly, from the beginning states didn’t keep their end of the bargain. 

In 1969, the Washington Research Project (the Children’s Defense Fund’s parent organization) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. partnered with others and examined federal audit reports on how Title I funds were being used and talked to numerous federal, state, and local officials and community leaders and parents about how those critical funds were being spent. Our report, Title I: Is It Helping Poor Children?, found the answer to our question was a resounding “No.” Rather than serving the special needs of poor and disadvantaged children, many of the millions of dollars Congress appropriated had been wasted, diverted, or otherwise misused by state and local education agencies. Title I funding was often being used as general aid and to supplant -- rather than supplement -- state and local education funds, including for construction and equipment unrelated to Title I goals. For example, Fayette County, Tennessee used 90 percent of its Title I funds for construction of a predominantly Black school despite a recent federal court order that the school system desegregate, and Memphis, Tennessee used Title I funds to purchase 18 portable swimming pools in the summer of 1966. 

The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) subsequently conducted several other major studies that reinforced the importance of federal accountability for money targeted to help children most in need, especially poor children and children of color. In CDF’s first report, Children Out of School in America (1974), after knocking on thousands of doors in census tracts across the nation and interviewing many state and local school officials, we found that if a child was not White, or was White but not middle class, did not speak English, was poor, needed special help with seeing, hearing, walking, reading, learning, adjusting, or growing up, was pregnant at age 15, was not smart enough, or was too smart, then in too many places school officials decided school was not the place for that child. 

We should learn from and correct our mistakes and stop repeating them over and over again for our children’s sake. It is crucial that a strong Title I program reach the children in areas of concentrated poverty if and when ESEA is reauthorized. Unfortunately the House Education and Workforce Committee, charged to lead in moving an ESEA reauthorization bill in the House of Representatives, just approved a bill (H.R. 5) in a party line vote that fails to target the needs of the poorest children by adding a “portability” provision assuring these children less help. AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and many others join us in opposing the portability provision.

The portability provision in H.R. 5 would move us backwards by distributing the same amount for a poor child regardless of the wealth of the district or school she attends. This will unravel the intent of Title I by taking resources away from children in areas of concentrated poverty and offering extra resources to schools and districts with a few poor children who may not need them. The poorest students in schools with the highest concentrations of poor children need extra help to combat poverty’s barriers. Compounding this huge backwards step, H.R. 5 also removes strong accountability provisions required to make sure the children who need help most will actually be helped. 

It is morally indefensible and extraordinarily expensive that we have 14.7 million poor children in our country -- 6.5 million of them living at less than half the poverty level. All of these poor children exceed the combined residents in all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia. That more than 80 percent of Black and almost 75 percent or more of Latino public school students are unable to read and compute at grade level in 4^th and 8^th grades and, if they reach 9^th grade, 3 in 10 do not graduate within four years is a cause for extreme alarm and focused attention. Without targeted federal funding with accountability, the poorest children will lose out.

Poor children are not the only ones at educational risk. Special measures are needed to protect English language learners, children and youths with disabilities, children of color, and children and youths who are homeless or in our child welfare and juvenile justice systems. States and school districts must target resources to address achievement gaps for these vulnerable groups of children. The federal government must hold states accountable for making sure they make progress towards grade level achievement targets, high school graduation, and college and career preparation. 

The mistakes of the past should not be repeated and children and our nation need us to move forward, not backwards. No ESEA bill is better than a bill that has poor children subsidize the education of wealthier children. It is way past time for us to level the educational learning field for all children, especially those left behind.

Girls in Justice

I’m grateful for a powerful new book, Girls in Justice by artist Richard Ross, a follow-up to his moving earlier Juvenile in Justice, which combines Ross’ photographs of girls in the juvenile justice system with interviews he gathered from over 250 detention facilities across the United States. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the deeply disturbing photographs speak volumes. Ross uses the power of photography to make visible the hidden and harsh world of girls in detention. These heartwrenching images coupled with the girls’ ages and life stories should move us to confront the cruel and unjust juvenile justice system in our nation. These girls are ours: our neighbors, our children’s classmates, our daughters and granddaughters, sisters, cousins, and nieces — and, for some young children, our mothers. Girls in Justice invites the question:Why are so many girls, especially girls of color, confined in our nation’s detention facilities, and what are we as a society going to do about it? 

We must all work tirelessly to give hope and a fair chance to these girls and all children by promoting policies, programs, and supports that help them and their families, especially those most at risk. We must combat systemic problems that contribute to family and community dysfunction and wreak havoc on developing children, including girls; we must dig beneath the surface and examine the root cause of girls’ “offenses” and why injustice saps the hopes of so many young lives on our watch. 

In 2013, one in five girls in the United States was poor, and girls of color were disproportionately poor. From birth to young adulthood, children — especially poor children and children of color — encounter multiple and cumulative risk factors that often result in their being funneled into the prison pipeline through the juvenile and criminal justice systems and locked up behind bars. Such massive incarceration is sentencing millions of children to social and economic death. The pipeline to prison is lodged at the intersection of poverty and race and is intolerable in a professed society of opportunity. In 2007, the Children’s Defense Fund launched the Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crusade to confront youth incarceration and the factors driving it and propose solutions to replace it with a pipeline to college and career. While twice as many boys as girls are arrested, girls are the fastest-growing segment of the juvenile justice system. As girls rock the cradle, they rock the future, and we must pay attention to both girls and boys to ensure the development of healthy families.

Girls of color and poor girls face special challenges before they enter the juvenile justice system, during their confinement, and when they return to their communities after release. At the front end, racial disparities and the lack of appropriate treatment and support that run through every major child-serving system negatively impact their life chances by pushing more children into juvenile detention and adult prison. These include limited health and mental health care; lack of quality early childhood support experiences (including home visiting, Early Head Start and Head Start, child care, preschool, and kindergarten); children languishing in foster care waiting for permanent families and shunted through multiple placements; and failing schools with harsh zero-tolerance discipline policies, mostly for nonviolent offenses, that suspend, expel, and discourage children who then too often drop out and do not graduate. Too little effort is made to divert girls from the juvenile justice system despite the existence of successful evidence-based programs.

Girls in the system often encounter a unique set of challenges. Almost three quarters of them have been sexually or physically abused. Most are arrested for nonviolent offenses such as truancy, running away, or alcohol and substance use which can often be linked to severe abuse or neglect. These nonviolent offenses, or status offenses, would not be considered offenses for an adult. Poverty has an impact: although the trauma of sexual violence and abuse affects many girls, poor girls often lack adequate supports to keep them from juvenile detention.

Victimized girls often face more trauma and stigmatization by being held in juvenile detention facilities instead of diverted to appropriate community-based alternatives. Whether confinement is temporary or longer term, programs and personnel are often not equipped to deal with their unique needs and sometimes exacerbate the trauma. Reports are rampant of confined girls being emotionally, physically, and sexually abused, isolated, separated from their babies, unable to visit their family members regularly, and humiliated through common practices like pat downs. Detention centers need more comprehensive, gender-responsive, trauma-informed, culturally relevant services for girls. 

After release, girls, many of whom may already have been disconnected from their families and communities, need help through education, employment, and family and community support including programs to strengthen their families and assure them access to health and mental health services. Effective reentry plans should include school reenrollment, housing, job training, case management, and mentoring. All help reduce recidivism. We should all feel ashamed as the girls in this book talk about reentering detention multiple times and how these are generational patterns. This revolving door of individual and family confinement must end — now.

It is way past time for every adult to take responsibility for reducing the number of girls and boys behind bars through prevention and diversion programs and community supports both before and after detention. And it is way past time for adults of every race and income group to break our silence about the pervasive breakdown of moral, family, community and national values, to place our children first in our lives, to rebuild family and community, to model the behavior we want our children to learn, and to never give up on any child. We do not have a “child and youth problem” in America, but we have a profound adult problem. It is time for adults to address it and to give all of our children true justice: hope, opportunity, and love.