The Challenge of Hungry Kids in Willard
A guest post by Greg Williams
Greg Williams is the Economic Development Director for the City of Willard. His recollection below of witnessing childhood hunger was written in June of 2012.
“The matter that brought this experience back to me is current, ongoing, in Willard,” Greg said in an email on Thursday. “Personal interaction with a parent last week was cause for me to reach out to [School District Superintendent] Dr. Wilken, who then directed me to one of his district social workers.”
“There is need,” he explains. “And I’m going to help do something about reducing the challenge of childhood hunger in this community.”
Greg’s story, along with his opinions and his mission, are shared personally and not as an affiliate of the City of Willard.
A quick word from MoM
Back in the late ‘90s, I spent nearly three months being homeless in California.
It was my own fault—the culmination of years of irresponsibility, a complete lack of direction, and of never being held properly accountable for my behavior.
I fled Missouri with a multiverse of problems, $100 dollars in my pocket, and only a car to sleep in.
Upon arriving, I almost immediately found a job—I had to—but had no money for a place to live.
Though not ideal at the time, having slept in my car is now a pleasant memory. I’d often find a quiet spot in the parking lot of a country church—arriving around 10 P.M. and then leaving shortly after the sun came up.
But I also remember being hungry. And I learned that being hungry when food is on the way is very different from being hungry when you know that it is not.
It’s the difference between expectation and desperation.
Hunger as an adult was bad enough, and I’m glad I never experienced it as a child.
With the recent and rapid increase in food prices, childhood hunger has risen, too.
The Willard Masonic Lodge is hosting a charity golf tournament to help pay off school lunch balances in the Willard School District. Click here for more information or to sign up.
“It wasn’t my weekend to eat.”
by Greg Williams, June 2012
I hadn’t known Jake long. Probably a couple months or so. As part of the Springfield Chamber’s “Partners in Education” initiative, each staff team member spent time every other week in the school, tutoring kids. We’d go through a few math problems, flash cards, read a book and work on whatever other suggestions the teacher had that particular week.
Early on, I dreaded having to leave the office and drive to the school, just to sit in a hallway and do flashcards with a third grader. I was busy, had a lot on my plate, and could think of a hundred other things I needed to be doing. All that changed when Jake uttered those words.
That day, he was having difficulty concentrating. It was a Monday morning, about an hour before lunchtime. Jake stared at the book we were reading together, showing no motivation, no interest whatsoever. He gazed down the long hallway as if I wasn’t even there. Clearly, this was an interaction that was going nowhere. Frustrated, I said “What’s wrong with you? I’ve not seen you like this before.”
“I’m hungry.” he said. “I’m just really hungry.”
Sensing that he was just diverting attention from his tutoring, I joked “Yeah, it’s almost time for lunch and I could eat a horse!”
No reaction.
“Come on, Jake,” I said. “Let’s get going here. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“I’m hungry.” Jake said, again.
I tried to rationalize this the best I could and asked him if he skipped breakfast that morning. “You do eat breakfast, don’t you?” I quipped. “All the experts say breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
At that moment, right there in the school’s hallway, his six words astonished me and changed my perspective of the challenges that hundreds (likely thousands) of children in our community face, most often right before our eyes, right in our back yard. In our neighborhoods. In our schools. And most of us are oblivious to it.
“It wasn’t my weekend to eat.”
I didn’t know what to say. How to react to what I’d just heard come from the mouth of a nine-year-old child. I knew I had to respond. With something. But I didn’t have the words. I just sat there, staring at him – looking straight into his brown eyes. After a few uncomfortable seconds, I asked “You haven’t eaten anything since Friday?”
“Nope.” he said. “I ate lunch here Friday and when I got home my mom told me that it was my sister's weekend to eat so I just had water and some Gatorade.”
I’m not an overly-emotional person. Far from it. Throughout my life, I’ve found it very easy to just brush off emotion, often to a fault. But this hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt tears beginning to well up in my eyes. My stomach began to ache. I felt an intense sense of sympathy that I’d not experienced in a long time.
A few minutes later, Mrs. Collier, Jake’s teacher, suddenly appeared and told him that it was time to walk to the lunchroom. She didn’t have to tell him twice. He leaped from his chair and walked swiftly toward the stairs leading to the lunchroom on the school’s main level. No “good-bye”, no “see ya next week”. No nothing. He just wanted to eat. He needed to eat.
Mrs. Collier thanked me for my time and carried on some sort of small talk (I have no memory of any of it). She turned back toward her classroom and lined up the other kids to head downstairs.
I was motionless. Stunned. Sad. I couldn’t get up from my chair, one of those kid-sized chairs that puts an adult’s knees right on the chin. I just sat there. The school custodian walked past and asked if everything was alright. “Yeah, I just need a minute.” I said.
My day was finished. It was 11:45 a.m. and I was done for the day. Emotionally spent. A numbing sense of sadness overwhelmed me, and I knew there was no way I could get anything accomplished if I went back to the office.
I needed to somehow sort this out, come to grips with how a kid can go more than 48 hours without food. How a young child can concentrate, focus and learn anything in the classroom after having not eaten anything all weekend. Anything. All weekend.
I got in my car and drove through the school’s neighborhood. Probably for an hour. I’d been in this part of the city before, probably a hundred times, but I had never really noticed the actual “condition” of the neighborhood. Just a few blocks west of downtown, with its upscale restaurants and fancy bars, beautiful new office buildings, $40 million baseball stadium and high-end loft apartments, this neighborhood had been left behind. Ignored.
It seemed that one of every three houses on this street was empty, boarded up and abandoned. Others were inhabited but not well maintained. Grass hadn’t been mowed in a long time. Weeds growing up higher than the front porches of many homes. This is Jake’s neighborhood. It was all he knew of our community.
A year or so earlier, the school’s principal asked my wife Jennifer (also a Chamber employee) and me to take a few girls out to lunch. They’d done well academically in the past quarter and this outing was a special treat. We picked them up at the school around 11:30 and drove to Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza. Yeah, that was their choice, not ours! The pizza place was on the south side of town, about a 15-minute drive away. We passed by dozens of retail stores, the mall, the massive hospital buildings and clinics along the route.
Jennifer and I heard one girl in the back seat say, “Have you ever been to the mall?” The two others screamed in unison, “NO!" One said, "Is that it over there?”
“Wow.” I thought to myself. “It’s not one world.”
That’s a phrase I’d used a thousand times, often comparing how most of my friends and I live our lives compared to those with more money than they’d ever be able to spend. The “one percenters” who’ve either been lucky enough to inherit a mass fortune or who’ve worked extremely hard for a long time to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
I whispered to Jennifer, “These girls have never been to the mall.”
She said, “They may've never been this far from home.”
Chuck E. Cheese’s is no more than five or six miles from the school, but it might as well be in another state. It was puzzling to me how these kids had never had lunch or a birthday party here and I couldn’t resist asking “why?”
“My mom and dad don’t have a car.” Katy responded.
“Yeah, us either.” another said.
Jackie chimed in. “My dad’s in prison and we don’t have enough money to go out.”
We had a great time. The girls enjoyed lunch and we had enough time to play a few games in the restaurant before getting them returned to school.
After dropping them off, the drive back to work was quiet. Neither Jennifer nor I seemed to have the ability to completely process what we’d just experienced. Breaking the silence, I said, “What the hell?”
“I don’t know.” Jennifer replied. “It’s hard to comprehend.”
That’s the only conversation we ever had about that experience, although I’m certain it’s never really left either of our minds.
I shared the story with the school principal a week or so later, still somewhat bewildered. He said, “These girls’ neighborhood, Jake’s neighborhood, is their world. It’s pretty much all they know.”
He continued. “Many of these families are stuck in the cycle of poverty and they don’t have the support base to find a way out.”
“They’re poor, but that doesn’t make them bad people – any less valuable than the rest of us.” he said. “More than 95 percent of my students here are on the Free and Reduced Lunch and Breakfast program and, often times, what they eat at school is the only meal of the day.”
He further explained that many of his students live in single-parent homes. “Maybe Dad’s in jail and they’re just waiting for his release so they can move on to the next town.” he said. “New faces all the time here - familiar faces often disappear without notice or explanation.”
“They’re proud people.” he said. “Poor, but proud. Some choose not to seek assistance that’s available, instead choosing to eke out an existence the best they can.”
Often, that means there’s little food. Or no food. It means that there may or may not be a source of home heat in the winter, no coats and gloves, no boots to wear on the walk to school.
The years passed, and I found myself driving through the neighborhood - for no specific reason. I mentally re-visited the experiences I’d had there. Stopped at a red light across the street from the school, which is now an interim early childhood education center for kids who meet low-income guidelines and have the greatest education needs.
As I sat at the light, a deafening blast of rap music hit me. I mean, it literally hit me. I could physically feel the noise. The windows of this 1980-something Chevy Monte Carlo in the convenience store parking lot were down. A guy in the front passenger seat appeared sound asleep (how, I have no idea given the decibel level of the music inside the car). In the back seat was a young boy, probably four or five years old. He stared right at me. As our eyes met, I recognized the sense of helplessness this kid was feeling. He wasn’t clean, his hair wasn’t brushed. He just looked tired and sad.
I thought to myself, “This kid has no chance.” Pessimistic? Yeah. Realistic? Probably. Unfortunately.
Then I thought about Jake. My mind took me back to that Monday morning, an hour before lunchtime, when he forever altered my perspective.
“It wasn’t my weekend to eat.”
I wondered where he might be, what is going on in his life. For a moment, I was sad again. For Jake. For the three girls we took to the pizza place. For every young child facing similar challenges.
I remember whispering to myself, “Lord, show me how to make a difference.”
It’s not one world.
It’s never going to be.
But I’ll find a way to make a difference. Somewhere. Some day.
Note: The image above is in the public domain.
Heartbreaking.