Read All About It!

And sometimes, after 24 full hours of words, just eight are enough.

Goodnight and thank you! See you next year.

After 23.5 hours and 47 posts, we’ve typed a lot of words. But if you’ve been reading along (or even if you’re catching up afterward, in which case you are significantly more clever than I am), it probably isn’t our words that will stay with you. This project began as a work of admiration for Blue Gargoyle, what they do, and the people involved. We hope that this Blogathon has let you see why we chose them, why we think their program is so deserving of your support, and why we wanted to stay up around the clock to share their story with the Web.
Our first and foremost thanks goes to everyone who spent time talking to us, most particularly Michael, Bea, Justin, Jane, and Shane. Additional kudos and massive appreciation follows for everyone who made a pledge to help us reach $2500. Without Miko, sleep would have been victorious; without the Yellow Darts, the night would have been very lonely. If you cruised this blog, left a comment, or sent an email, you helped, and we thank you. And if you are just now seeing this hours or days after the fact — it’s not too late to make a contribution to Blue Gargoyle.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone.

The relationships between the children and the mothers exist. But I can think of a few – I’m thinking of one mom in particular who was in our program for quite some time. She was very bright. And she was very close to being able to actually take her GED. And she said – and I’m not a diagnostician, but that doesn’t stop me – she had a real problem herself with the kind of borderline attachment disorder with her mother. A mother who pays no attention to a child, a child that just sort of grows up without a mom, carries a lot of baggage. She has no model and she has what I call some parts missing: difficult to form an attachment with anybody else and to have any empathy with anybody else. To small children it’s a while before they can think of themselves as separate, and that everybody’s not an extension of them. And they don’t get to go through stages and depending on the severity, they can be the ones who grow up to be sociopaths or they can just grow up to be kind of crippled. So this mom had a baby who really was failure to thrive: he was sick, and wasn’t gaining weight, and he was 6 months old and he wouldn’t smile. And we tried all kinds of things. I asked permission to give him rice milk instead of formula, but he would have to be hospitalized from time to time and we would be there with her. She did not know how to nurture. She didn’t know to be a nurturing mom. She loved her baby, but she didn’t know hot to do it. So we got her on track – I’m not saying she was perfect, because she wasn’t, but certainly better – and he started to thrive, and while he if course had developmental delays, we worked with him so that he was catching up. It was a very good thing to see.

One of the things I say to people or I ask all the time when they ask me for success stories, is ‘what is your definition of success? because I’m sure it’s a whole lot different than mine.’ Some days success is not letting your jaw drop. Success is just having someone show up every day for 2 weeks. Success is having a mom say “you know, we tried peas and corn last night and he really liked it. That’s success. “ It’s a lot of stuff. Another mother I can think of is extraordinary. Not perfect but extraordinary. She came to us very young, she stuck with it, and her outlook, her realizations, her understandings are such that she is just not giving up. She’s making huge progress herself and we’ve had her little girl in the CDC since she was an infant and now she’s a little over 3 and just right on track and doing great, and that’s success. The community has to support a coordinated effort.

This is not something like ‘well why don’t they just send their kids to school?’ and ‘what’s wrong with our schools that they can’t teach our kids?’ You can’t teach a kid who has never been read to and has never seen a book. You can’t teach a kid when a kindergarten teacher has certain expectations of skills a child is going to have, and if they don’t they have to start back, and test scores are going to show it all along the line. And then we have this whole wonderful No Child Left Behind business, which is dreadful, because what it does – and we see it here, because we have so many more teenagers than we used to have – is that kids are encouraged to drop out. And then — this is even worse, I think, and it’s perfectly legal, and it’s part of the No Child Left Behind legislation – is that the schools are allowed to send the list of dropouts to the armed services, and then they are recruited. And some of the kids call and they say ‘well you’re not going anyplace. Join the Army.’ I happen to think, by the way, that joining the Army is a great idea unless you’re going to go to Iraq, and then it’s not a great idea. I think the armed services have a lot to offer. I was a teacher during Vietnam and I was teaching high school, and I’d see my boys and girls going into the armed services and I’d think, I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. So we have a lot to buck, not the least of which (you’ll pardon me if you don’t think the way I do) is our current political situation. George Bush. And the thing is that Barbara Bush, his mother, has a foundation that supports family literacy, and I want to say to him: don’t you ever talk to your mother? Because he has consistently cut the Even Start budget, which is a budget that funds family literacy programs. So I get half the money I used to get from Even Start. Each year he tries to zero it out and each year he gets forestalled a little bit, but it’s less and less and less. But it’s far more important to be spending that money trying to look for those pesky weapons of mass destruction.

Next Up: Winding Down

I started off as a teacher back east in Wilmington. I was teaching high school. And then I sort of went into the business world for a while and really honed my management stuff, and then came back to social service and spent several years in the child protection division of the juvenile court — the abuse and neglect side of the court – working for judges who would assign us to cases as another pair of ears and eyes and advocating in court for the best interests of the child. So there was a lot of that, and it just covered everything. And then I came here 5 years ago.

This program was in existence. It certainly has enlarged since I took it over, but in fairness I have to say I had 5 years to do it. It was a newer program when I first came into it. One of the things that I was able to do that I didn’t think I was going to have to but I do is provide more funding. So I spend a really lot of time writing grants, and so with that I’m able to extend it and able to hook into other programs, like we have a contract wit the Chicago public schools for their prevention programs, which is 0-3. So that fits right into family literacy and not a problem, but it also allows me more latitude for families because if there is a mom who already has her high school diploma but needs or wants parenting and so on, she can be part of the program. I don’t have to be as strict with the population. So that makes it a little easier in some ways.

Over the last 5 years several staff members – not several – but some of the staff members are from the African-American community and some are not, and some have very middle class upbringings and some really came up through poverty and have become the success stories in their families. I find that I think that’s probably the most difficult thing for those staff members to do: to not judge what these women do, to not be disapproving, to not show your disapproval. I had 2 that just couldn’t get it. And it blocks all kinds of things when that’s happening. And to have someone there who is undermining or sneering or whatever: can’t. Can’t.

They all say it’s to get a GED. But we give placement tests as they come in. so while everybody will say that the #1 goal is to get their GED, if you’re reading on the 3rd grade level, it’s not going to happen fast. And I get questions like ‘how long will this tale?’ Up to you. But because we work with goalsetting here – we do a lot of work with goals – I always say at intake ‘If I were to guess what your #1 goal would be, I would say it would be to get your GED.” And they say, “Yup. That’s it.”’ And I say ‘you know, I like to split goals up. Into big goals, into smaller goals. So you can pat yourself on the back a little bit. Unless you are ready right this minute to take that GED test, probably there are other things you need to do first.’ So we set other goals, incremental goals, so that there’s a feeling of success and there’s not a feeling of failure or just giving up because it seems soooo far away, and it many cases it is far away. We do a very strong component of case management.

Next Up: Jane’s Story, Part 6

In June we had the first poverty simulation that’s ever been done in the city of Chicago. It’s fabulous: a beautifully designed activity that was done by a political committee action group in Missouri with a trunkful of props. For a few hours in the morning participants come in and get a scenario. We group them together: they might not know each other, but they suddenly become a family, a parents and 2 kids or whatever, and this is what their situation is, this is what their money is and where it comes from, and this is what they have to do. They get four 15-minute weeks. It’s in a big room with tables that represent all of the agencies and resources and so forth that they have to wade through: when you are in poverty you have to wade through all this, and it is constantly a hurry up and wait situation, you can’t get there from here. And it’s not the same thing – I keep telling this to people – it is not the same as being broke. We are talking about intergenerational poverty. We are talking about a completely different mindset where planning for the future doesn’t begin to enter into your thinking because you are always responding to the latest crisis. The thing is this: with poverty – and there have been so many studies that have been done showing it – poverty like this, not being broke but poverty, generational poverty, is probably the single most accurate predictor of academic failure. Even more than having drug abusing parents who have money, or substance abuse; poverty is the single most accurate predictor of failure in school. Studies have been done that show that children from the very poorest strata will enter kindergarten with cognitive scores that are 65% lower than the most fortunate. This is just trying to get them to understand that there is such a thing as being able to plan ahead. So there’s more that we do than just offer literacy.

I have contacted people who are in charge of some of the transitional housing places and so forth. I have a good relationship with them. So I spoke to one of them today and said ‘how long is your list?’ and she said ‘well, it looks long on paper but it really won’t be long, so just tell me who you want.’ Because you cant do anything if you don’t have a place to live, and going to school is going to be your last priority. And people find when they go through this poverty simulation that if you are a single parent and your child is sick, you can’t take him to school and you can’t go to work and you can’t go to the DHS office and you can’t go to the cash station, and you don’t have – none of them have – checking accounts, or access to any kind of transportation except public transportation, or if you do have a car, it’s kind of iffy. And you have to wait in line, and if you happen to be employed – if you happen to be one of the thousands and thousands and thousands of working poor – then 8 hours of your day has to be spent at work where you don’t get any of this stuff accomplished. So you find yourself lugging a sick kid to the DHS office, or staying at home and not going to work and maybe losing your job. Or you could be on a different shift, in which case you have to worry about childcare, but you can’t take your child to childcare if he’s sick. So there you go: you can’t do anything, and you have no resources or support system. I think that’s one of the things that the community has to realize that they don’t realize. Not all people on public aid just sit around drinking beer and waiting for their checks to come. That’s not it a all. And if you’re a mom with a child, that’s really not it at all.

Because it’s such a different culture, family planning – even though they know about it – doesn’t really enter into their thinking, and it’s not a value judgment comment. It’s just that you’re talking about the difference between Italy and Holland. I’ve spoken to people who have been on public aid and it was the first time that they weren’t generational and they got off public aid. And one of them said: ‘when you’re poor, you don’t have any hope, and the only thing you can do is get through each day.’ Just hope that an emergency doesn’t come up, and hope that your kid doesn’t get sick, and hope that you don’t get sick and just slog through day by day. There’s no planning ahead.

Blood drains from my face when I look at our heating bills. I can’t imagine. And it’s much more than that. It’s not being able to make ends meet, and so they fall prey to the payday cash loans, and they go to the cash stations to pay their bills because they don’t have checking accounts, so they pay a fee there and they pay a fee to cash their checks. And I would like some bankers to be aware of this, because these are usurious rates. Surely you can do better and also enlarge your customer base. But the thing is that that’s what you have to be aware of when you have a program like this. You are not working with people that were raised with the same sensibilities, and sometimes the things you say sound like you are speaking in tongues. Makes no sense whatsoever. And our goal, and I make this very clear to my entire staff, is that there is nothing we do that can seem at all judgmental. Drop your middle class stuff at the door, because it doesn’t mean anything right here. We operate under the supposition that all families have strengths — not the same strengths necessarily that ours might have, but all families have strengths. All moms love their kids. And it’s those strengths that we build on, because I can’t think of anything that would turn someone off more than when in essence you say to them ‘you know all that stuff you’re doing? Stop doing it, it’s wrong.’ And there’s a certain culture you have to honor.

Next Up: Jane’s Story, Part 5