Lonesome No More!
All morning I thought about this comment by Cleveland educator Mary Beth Matthews on a Brewed Fresh Daily post about last week's school shooting.
She's right. Talk is cheap. Where are the solutions?
Here's a rudimentary outline for one.
What if we all "adopted" a child in the city of Cleveland to look out for...sort of like the artificial extended families that Kurt Vonnegut proposed in Slapstick. Or Save the Children, only much closer to home.
Let's see how that might work...
There are approximately 117,862 children under age 19 in the city of Cleveland.
It breaks down like this:
age 0-5................26,824
age 5-9................27,637
age 10-14............32,107
age 15-19.............31,294
TOTAL...............117,862
According to Cleveland Magazine's Rating the Suburbs, there are 76 suburbs in the Cleveland area.
Here are the total number of adults age 25+ for only 6 (3 East; 3 West) of those 76 suburbs:
Cleveland Heights..........27,477
Fairview Park.................12,476
Lakewood.......................39,085
Rocky River..........................15,136
Shaker Heights...................19,701
South Euclid........................15,769
TOTAL...........................129,644
See where I'm going with this?
Source: American Factfinder
She's right. Talk is cheap. Where are the solutions?
Here's a rudimentary outline for one.
What if we all "adopted" a child in the city of Cleveland to look out for...sort of like the artificial extended families that Kurt Vonnegut proposed in Slapstick. Or Save the Children, only much closer to home.
Let's see how that might work...
There are approximately 117,862 children under age 19 in the city of Cleveland.
It breaks down like this:
age 0-5................26,824
age 5-9................27,637
age 10-14............32,107
age 15-19.............31,294
TOTAL...............117,862
According to Cleveland Magazine's Rating the Suburbs, there are 76 suburbs in the Cleveland area.
Here are the total number of adults age 25+ for only 6 (3 East; 3 West) of those 76 suburbs:
Cleveland Heights..........27,477
Fairview Park.................12,476
Lakewood.......................39,085
Rocky River..........................15,136
Shaker Heights...................19,701
South Euclid........................15,769
TOTAL...........................129,644
See where I'm going with this?
Source: American Factfinder
posted by Christine Borne at 3:46 PM
5 Comments:
It takes a village to raise a child...
I sure hope you and Jim will do this instead of having children of your own. Other people's children can be such a blessing...
It would be a great idea in theory, but not too easy to do practically. Adopting a child to look out for would only work if the child and his/her parent(s) went along with the whole idea. My husband and I live in Cleveland and even though we have our own six we also have tried to keep an eye on the children that live in the neighborhood.
The neighbor across the street from us claims she has no way of controlling her own children- all of them (ranging in age from 2-18). Her two year old swears at her and she does nothing to stop him. Her 11 year old doesn't go to school and she makes no effort to get him there. Her 14 year old breaks the law and she covers for him.
When my husband and I try to talk to the children about the positives of education or why they should not be breaking into the empty houses and stealing, they refuse to listen and the mom gets mad at us for not minding our business. (Is it our business when the neighborhood is torn apart by these kids?)
Coming from the suburbs isn't going to have much more of an impact. Plus, the suburban adult's lack of knowledge of how life is for these people can lead to them taking gross advantage of the suburban people. I know as I have seen it happen over and over with many well meaning people who just don't know.
I was raised in the suburbs, my husband was raised in the inner city. I know because I live in it. I don't know what will help- outside of, of course, teaching these parents to do their job. There might be a few you can help by having people 'adopt' them, but don't expect everything to work out to be perfect.
Hi Kate- welcome to RBCA! You make a number of really great points. Especially the part about inner city kids taking advantage of well-meaning suburban adults who just don't understand where they're coming from. As a former public librarian, I have seen that firsthand.
Rather than prescribe a solution exactly, my post was meant to suggest that if we could only get 117,000 suburban adults (the adult population of only five suburbs, so it's not a huge number) to move back into the city, there would be more adults around to watch out for those kids. (It sounds like you and your husband are doing a good job of that already!)
Er, sorry, I meant 6, not 5 - it's too early to be thinking....
Christine
Thank you for the clarifications. I didn't mean to appear as if I was jumping on you. Its just so many people who don't live here and don't know what it is like here (or what it is like to be an inner city teen), seem to come up with all of these wonderful looks good in theory but doesn't cut it ways to help clean up the place (like throwing more money on the school system when parents don't bother putting their kids in the schools). You cannot force people to care or to change, they need to want to. You can help them find that desire within them but not force it on them, you know?
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