When I worked in daycare throughout high school, I co-led an elementary school classroom dedicated to helping k-8 children navigate their online classes during the pandemic. This service was mostly for families where both parents had to spend their days working and did not have access to at-home babysitting services for their children. So, the kids would come into the daycare, me and the other teachers would help them with their online classes, and they would get breakfast and lunch, just like a regular school.
Because of the online nature of the classroom experience during COVID, most children were unable to socialize, play, run, and experience education like they did before. I reflected on how much I enjoyed physically going to school when I was a kid. I really struggled to feel happy and calm at home because of how chaotic it was. With three younger siblings and a single-mother in my home, it was always loud, chaos, and unpredictability. It was hard to feel loved, cared for, and as nurtured as my younger siblings, so going to school and getting to see my friends and teachers was my escape.
I realized that this might be the case for the kids I am teaching and did my best to understand how this might be affecting their development, their socialization, and their overall educational experiences. I tried my best to make our classroom feel like a home-away-from home when our kids came in for, “class”. There were two children in my elementary classroom that were brother and sister and they always happened to arrive after breakfast. Once we got them settled in every day, I noticed they had an extremely hard time focusing and staying awake. Every time I would look over at their computers, their head was tilted down leaning on the desk and their hands were over their stomach.
However, right before we served lunch, they would perk up and become filled with energy. After lunch, they were a lot more social with their peers, had barely any trouble focusing in class, and had no trouble falling asleep. It took very little time to realize that these kiddos did not have enough fuel in their bodies to get through the day. One day after they arrived, I pulled them aside and offered them the breakfast I had saved for them. I noticed changes immediately that day in their ability to engage in learning. Another day after they arrived, I asked them if they had breakfast that morning. They both shook their head no. I asked them if they had dinner that night, and they told me they had to share a plate for dinner.
I asked them why and they told me that was all their dad could afford for them since their mom was sick and he works so hard to pay for her medicine. Although I didn’t know the whole story, I started to tie the pieces together. I did what I could to save items from lunch every day for them to take home. I would secretly collect bags of items that kids were going to throw away at lunch, or left over food that hadn’t been served and send it home with these kiddos. I noticed drastic changes in their energy levels, attention span, and evening test scores. Eventually, when school went back to normal, they left our daycare program and I haven’t connected with them since.
This situation stills haunts me to think about how common this is and how little everyone cares about it. If we put as much energy and money into children’s education as we did to wars, sports, media, etc. our children would be saved from our rigged systems. However, the people that make these decisions are either blind to the fact that we are failing our children, and thus society, or they simply don’t care. It’s so amazing what adequate nutrition and sleep can do to children’s functioning and academic success, yet so devastating that no one who can actually do anything about it cares.
We need to save our children!
