I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “And she was pretty.”
“Did you kiss her?” Piper asked, cutting right to the chase.
“I’m done answering questions,” I declared.
I didn’t have a choice in the matter. If I continued to talk about Adele, I had no doubt I’d be right back to where I was last night. I needed to put in a long day at work today, so this had to end.
“He kissed her,” Eden decided.
Now it was my turn to do the ignoring. Without confirming or denying Eden’s claim, I walked over, grabbed two freshly baked donuts, and turned to walk back out to the front to grab a coffee.
I needed to get myself back on track with work. We had a festival starting at the end of the week. I couldn’t afford any more distractions.
As I took a huge bite of a donut and left my sisters in the back of the bakery, Piper asserted, “We don’t need confirmation from him. We’ll get all the answers we need when the pictures are published.”
Anna had said she’d get some teaser shots published later this week. I only hoped I’d be prepared for the storm I was convinced they’d bring.
Adele
By Friday, I felt a plethora of emotions. I’d reached the end of the school week with no shortage of eye-opening news. So much had happened since the incident with Brent on Monday. If nothing else, I had become a woman on a mission.
The words the cafeteria worker said to me when I went in to pay the balance on Brent’s account had sparked a fire in me. I’d always been concerned about children who didn’t have enough to eat, but I guess I hadn’t realized how bad it was. I always thought about these children not having enough to eat on the weekends and during the summer months. It never dawned on me that they still had issues getting enough food to eat when they were in school.
I didn’t exactly have an idea just yet as to how I was going to accomplish my goal, but I knew I needed to do something.
So, while I walked out of work on Monday feeling so much anger and wanting to start shaking my fist in the air at anyone who’d listen to me rant about the injustices these children were facing, I didn’t. I did my best to allow that fury to fuel my motivation to do something to fix it.
When I went back to school on Tuesday, I made it a point to march down to the cafeteria when my students were in their special for the day. Tuesday was music class.
Walking into the cafeteria, I found a different woman working at the register.
“Can you tell me what the total balance due for all the students in this school is?” I asked when I stopped in front of her.
“The whole school?” she asked, clearly surprise by my request.
Nodding, I repeated, “The whole school.”
She eyed me curiously, but said, “Sure. Hang tight just a second.”
I waited.
When she returned with an answer, I nearly fell over.
“Six thousand four hundred twenty-three dollars and seventy-five cents.”
“I’m sorry… did you say over sixty-four hundred dollars?”
She nodded and added, “That’s just this school. When you count in the other elementary schools in the district along with the middle school and high school, the debt is staggering. I don’t know the exact number, but I’m guessing it’s safe to say that it’s easily a five-digit number across the district.”
I stood there feeling nothing but shock.
Shock and curiosity.
“And would I be correct to assume that all of the children in this district that have school meal debt are being given cheese sandwiches for lunch instead of the meals that the rest of the students who don’t have outstanding balances are getting?” I asked.
After giving me a sympathetic look, she confirmed, “Yes, that’s correct.”
The problem was much bigger than I had originally thought.
With all the information I could process at that moment, I thanked the cafeteria worker and left.
Since then, I’d been wracking my brain trying to figure out what the best way to solve the problem would be.
If it had just been my elementary school, I’d have likely come up with a plan and already put it into motion. It was just over six thousand dollars. It was high, but it was manageable. But considering I now knew the issue was widespread through the district, I couldn’t just ignore the other schools in my hometown.
So, my first step was to determine just how bad the problem was. I went through the chain of command to find the person who’d be able to give me numbers for each school in the district. Sadly, that was when I realized this wasn’t just a problem. It was a crisis.
A crisis of epic proportions.
The total school meal debt for the entire district was just over eighty-thousand dollars. There were nearly ten thousand kids in the district. I didn’t know all the specifics, but I was willing to bet those numbers meant there were a lot of kids going hungry every day or eating meals that just weren’t substantial enough to help the minds and bodies of growing children.
I had no doubt that if I dug deep enough, I’d be able to find a link between academic performance and hunger. I was confident there’d be a direct correlation between the two. Presumably, the kids who had higher school meal debt would likely have the lowest academic performance.
In my opinion, that was unacceptable. It was very easy for someone to say that every child that attended the school had the same opportunities. But did they really? Maybe they had access to the same lessons, but if they couldn’t focus on those lessons because of something out of their control, I didn’t think it was an appropriate observation.
Throughout the week, I’d seen just how accurate my theory was. On Monday, Brent had been incredibly distracted, unable to complete his work. As the week progressed, I paid attention.
Sure enough, Brent was far more engaged in what was being taught than he had been earlier in the week. He also seemed to be a bit more talkative with his classmates during free time like recess.
It felt good to know that I’d been able to help him get to that place. And it was good to see that Brent didn’t seem to have any lingering thoughts about all of it, which is precisely what I had hoped for.
Considering I wanted to have that effect on any kid who was in a similar situation, something needed to change. In most cases, these children were facing serious stress in their home lives. The least I could do was try to make school a better place.
So, I was going to do something about everything I learned over the week. I wanted to do something about what I suspected was happening to so many children’s academics because they didn’t have enough food. I was going to do what I could to level the playing field, even if I could only make a difference in my district.
Now that my students had gone home for the weekend, I was planning to do the same. Only, while I hoped they’d be enjoying the break from schoolwork, I would be doing anything but relaxing.
I’d been wracking my brain all week trying to figure it all out, but I think I’d finally come up with an idea. This weekend I was going to be organizing all the details to figure out if I could make this happen. I was nearly home from work, and once I got there, I had a phone call to make because there was no way I could do this on my own.
I mean, I could.
But it would be much harder and take a lot longer.