Free and reduced lunch...

This is something I wrote last year (almost exactly one year ago today ) and in light of today being the FIRST day of school for CPS I thought it would be good to re-post and be re-reminded:

Today as I was leaving the school I currently am employed at in South Chicago, a band of 3 little cutey patooties were skipping by. They were so tiny and bouncy so much so that the little girl of the 3, the other 2 you've probably deduced were boys, could be heard via her clear blue and white beads smacking in to one another.

I looked down at the munchkins and proclaimed, "oh my you're adorable!"

She, the midget, I mean-little person, I mean-under tall young person, looked up at me and said, "Lunch?" as she tried to push pass myself and another taller, larger woman who was exiting the building with me to get at the "lunch."

I responded with, "huh?" for I could not understand her through her lost-from-decay front tooth, and quipped, "you're kinda small for a high school student!" She just looked at me blankly and like I had a decayed front tooth and responded vehemently with, "Food! Lunch!"

Mind you it was WAY past after school and closer to dinner time. The woman I was walking with told her, "no, honey we don't have lunch anymore today." The little angel with the missing tooth merely grunted and kept steppin...

She stomped on my heart though... here is a child that has equated school with free food. We do hope that our students are getting the educational nourishment we sometimes feel we, as educators, are force feeding them - and here is a beautiful little urchin knowing that behind the door that we were not exiting through quick enough, back onto the street in to one of the most economically depressed areas of Chicago, to get in to our comfy, clean cars where we can drive off out of this area to a drive-thru for crap we CHOOSE to eat! She just wanted some kind of nourishment - not questioning what she would get, but with a hope that she would receive something... anything... free... or reduced, and we had nothing to give or offer.

Was it another door shut on a promising young mind? Hopefully it was just shut on her appetite and not her hunger and thirst to one day learn from the educators behind those doors she was unable to go through and find some, "Lunch! Food!"