
And it wasn’t easy. For a time it looked as if the only way Kevin could attend school was if he enrolled as a “homeless youth” squatting in our house. To even get the legal authority to put him in school, my fiancé had to file for emergency custody at the juvenile court downtown, which she was denied on the grounds that Kevin was not in “imminent threat of physical harm” and that, since he was only going to be with us for a short time, jurisdiction actually belonged to Oregon, his home state. But since Oregon laws are much more lenient than those in Ohio, we were finally able to enroll him with a simple power of attorney form.We exhaled a collective sigh of relief—which turned out to be very premature. As temporary parents, we wanted to make sure Kevin went to a good school. Luckily for us, we lived within walking distance of an acclaimed high school. But after reaching out to the staff there, we were informed that the school was “at capacity,” and thus couldn’t take another student in the seventh grade.In most of the country’s school districts, this wouldn’t be a problem: Schools are never full. Attendence is based on geographic proximity, and even if a neighborhood is so dense that every class has 40 students, so be it—everyone gets to go to the closest school. In these districts, the success of the program usually provides a socio-economic snapshot of the surrounding area. In fact, a 2011 study in the American Sociological Review determined that growing up in an impoverished neighborhood significantly reduces the chances a child will graduate from high school at all, and that “the longer a child lives in that kind of neighborhood, the more harmful the impact.” So how do you prevent an academically challenged school in a poor neighborhood from becoming a factory for failure?
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement