When budget cuts have quietly hollowed out a classroom, the first thing you notice isn’t dramatic. No window is broken, and there isn’t a sign on an empty shelf. It’s not as big as that. A teacher pauses a bit too long before responding to a question because the number of students in front of her has increased from twenty-two to forty-one. Once open three days a week, the counselor’s door is now open one day. One Monday, a reading specialist who had been pulling a struggling third-grader for twenty minutes each morning just stopped.
Children start to vanish at those times. Naturally, not literally. They continue to arrive, be noted as present, and occupy their designated seats. However, something about them disappears from view. And the children are nearly always the same.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that discussions about school funding typically take place in press conferences and spreadsheets, whereas the effects are felt in hallways. The headline discusses federal-state cost shifts and percentages when Medicaid funding is cut. The real story revolves around a sixth-grader with epilepsy whose mother stopped getting enough sleep because she knew the school nurse might not be in the correct building on the wrong day, and a school nurse in a district outside of Denver who now covers three buildings instead of one. According to a recent statement by a school climate researcher, budgets convey a message. Students are currently receiving a negative message.
Before the year even ends, teachers are usually able to identify the specific type of student who gets lost in this shuffle. The English language learner’s mother is unable to attend the parent conference because she works two jobs. The child with an unidentified learning disability whose teacher had suspicions in October but was unable to obtain a referral until April. The high school student, whose homelessness liaison position was eliminated to balance the district budget, is discreetly couch-surfing following a family eviction. They are not failing because they are incapable of learning. The scaffolding surrounding them was discreetly taken down while everyone was focused on the bottom line, which is why they are failing.
The list of programs on the chopping block, which includes Title I, Head Start, after-school programs, school meals, AmeriCorps tutors, arts education, and library services, resembles a portrait of the people who genuinely keep a public school together. Remove any one of them, and the structure remains intact. When multiple people are stripped at once, as is currently the case, the cracks spread more quickly than anyone is willing to acknowledge.
The resignation that lies beneath the current moment is what, at least to those who have spent a lot of time in classrooms, makes it feel different. Teachers used to loudly retaliate. Now, there’s a more subdued tiredness, the kind that results from funding free after-school programs for ten years and then witnessing the district discontinue the program you created. A science instructor in Phoenix recently reported that her class size increased from twenty-two to forty-one in just one year, with the caveat that she might have fifty-five students on days when a substitute failed to show up. Fifty-five children. It’s the type of figure that becomes a fire-code question instead of a statistic.
In all of this, there is something worthwhile to sit with. What a nation spends on children is a better indicator of its priorities than what it says about them. Students who are currently falling between the cracks are not doing so by accident. The floor was taken out, plank by plank, while the adults quarreled over who should pay for the wood, which is why they are slipping. Somehow, it’s still unclear if anyone notices in time.
