A society that fails its children fails.

Two big things. First, let me share this message: the petition: Don't Drop Funding for TN's Family Resource Centers!

Governor Haslam’s latest budget proposal for the State of Tennessee no longer includes funding for Family Resource Centers across the state. Family Resource Centers are integral for assisting at-risk students of all ages with meeting basic needs. For example, “[t]he Family Resource Center may provide direct service or referrals for medical and dental care, food assistance, clothing aid, housing, transportation, child care, and parenting classes.” (Courtesy Kingsport City Schools website, Kingsport, TN).

If politicians in Tennessee are truly interested in student learning and success, these services would not be removed. Children cannot learn without proper nutrition, nor can they learn when other basic needs are not being met or when their home lives are chaotic. Their development will be compromised, and education will become a secondary goal at best.

PLEASE forward this petition to anyone else you might think is interested in signing it! LeAnne Broome, Kingsport's Family Resource Center director, will be meeting with Ron Ramsey this week to promote reinstatement of funding for FRCs into the budget. Her cause can be significantly supported by multiple signatures when she meets with him!


Second thing. Last week my friend John posted this following on his blog. I liked it so much that I wanted to share it here, there and everywhere. John is a department director at a major university, thus the references to department/campus/etc.

Here's John:



Tonight there was a talk on campus by Marian Wright Edelman. The department helped sponsor her visit, so I went to the talk. It was a fascinating talk. She started with a story of flying into Jackson in 1961 as a first-year law student, being picked up by Medgar Evers and taken to his house for dinner, only to shortly head to Greenwood when news came of shootings there. She got to Greenwood with Evers shortly, and saw the first use of police dogs in Mississippi. She saw mobs, beatings, and people tried and convicted minutes after arrest. And that was in her first night in Mississippi. She used that experience as her motivation for law school, and when she finished school at Yale, she returned to MS and became the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar. Early in her career she began to advocate for children, especially the most vulnerable among them, and she has not stopped. At some point tonight, she told a questioner something her Daddy told her. He said “Follow the need and you will never be without something to do.” She told the person tonight that she had tried to do that and felt like her life had been very full.

There were many interesting things tonight, but I failed to take a pen to note them. Some morsels (all paraphrased):

When you vote, ask yourself if it is good for the children.
A society that fails its children fails.
The “cradle to prison” pathway that puts 1 in 3 African American men in jail destroys the chance for productive citizens and costs a fortune.
“We do not have a shortage of money in this country. We have a shortage of values.”
There were more, all lost to my fuzzy brain, and tons of interesting historical morsels. It was a really good talk to hear. One bit she told is something she has told before. I found a variation of it online and pasted it below. It could easily apply beyond children’s welfare policy.



Marian Wright Edelman, 10/2/2010, in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the One Nation Working Together rally:

Everything our nation and all of us need to know about life can be learned from Noah’s Ark, according to an anonymous writer. Lesson one, don’t miss the boat. The United States is going to miss the boat to lead and compete in our globalizing world, because we are not preparing a majority of our children for the future. The greatest threat to America’s national security comes from no enemy without, but from our failure to invest in and educate all of our children. Yet every eleven seconds of the school day, a child drops out. A majority of children of all racial and income groups and over 80 percent of black and Hispanic children cannot read or compute at grade level in fourth, eighth or twelfth grade, if they have not already dropped out. Any nation that is failing to prepare all of its children for productive work and life is jeopardizing everything and needs to correct course right now. And all of us—all of us, parents, educators, community and religious and political leaders—need to be a part of the solution and not a part of the problem. God did not make two classes of children. Every single one deserves a quality education.

Noah’s lesson two, we are all in the same boat, which is the central message of today’s positive and inclusive rally. Many Americans may not like or think they have any self-interest in assuring a fair playing field for other people’s children, especially poor and minority children. But black, Hispanic and other minority children will be a majority of our child population in 2023. Isn’t it better to ensure that they are there to get—make sure that our Social Security and Medicare systems and productive workforce are in place, rather than us supporting them because we’ve neglected them in prisons? Our country, our states are spending on average three times more per prisoner that per public school pupil. I can’t think of a dumber investment policy, and we’ve got to change it.

Lesson three, plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the Ark. Tomorrow is today, and children have only one childhood. They need to be healthy now. They need quality, early childhood experiences now. They need first-rate schools with first-rate teachers, and they need to know that there is a good-paying job after college in their future. We must plan ahead and resist this quick-fix, quarterly profit-driven culture. It’s gotten us into trouble.

Lesson four, don’t listen to the critics and naysayers. Just get on with what the job is that needs to be done to educate our children. And if you don’t want to be criticized, don’t do anything, don’t be anything, and don’t say anything. Stand up and fight for our children, all of them.

Lesson five, for safety’s sake, travel in pairs. Better still, travel with your brothers and sisters and community leaders gathered here. We have got to turn back those who hijack Dr. King’s words but subvert his call to end poverty and excessive militarism and excessive individualism that’s killing our children. We must, particularly right now, make sure that we end those massive tax giveaways to the richest two percent, when fifteen-and-a-half million children are languishing in poverty.

Lesson six—almost done—remember that the Ark was built by amateurs, the Titanic was built by professionals. Use your citizen power, your vote, to wrest our ship of state from that small group of experts and powerful and greedy corporate pirates who recklessly jeopardized all of our lives for personal gain. Feel your own power. Use your own power. Don’t rely on experts.

And last lesson, build your future, build our children’s future and our nation’s future on high ground. Let’s leave our nation and world better than we found it, more just, more hopeful, more peaceful, more productive, more unified. This may be the first time when our children and grandchildren will be worse off than their parents and grandparents, unless we correct course with urgency, with the power reflected in your witness today, to get them to safe harbor.

Let me end with a brief prayer. God, we have pushed so many of our children into the tumultuous sea of life in small and leaky boats without survival gear and compass. Please forgive us and help our children to forgive us. And help us now to build that transforming movement, to give all of your children the anchors of faith and love, the rudder of hope, the sails of health and education, and the paddles of family and community, to keep them safe and strong when life’s sea gets worse. Thank you for your witness.