I remember the first time that I ate lunch at a public school. Kingston Middle School, grade eight, Suquamish WA. There I was in the dimly lit cafeteria gazing down upon the food that had been plopped onto my tray: three flimsy cheese filled breadsticks, a vacuum sealed “Smucker’s Uncrustable” peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a scoop of canned peaches swimming in high fructose corn syrup. Me, an impressionable and awkward tween, was being handed this processed, packaged, frozen, defrosted, and reheated “meal” and told to eat up. No wonder the kid to my right looked malnourished – school meals were the only source of nutrition he got each weekday, courtesy of the free lunch program for us whose parents’ income sunk down below the national poverty line. Or, what about Christine in my PE class who received a failing grade because she could not run the mile in under 20 minutes? On fitness testing day, I watched her self-confidence plummet as she stepped on the scale and the numbers simultaneously skyrocketed. There we were, given national standards to meet but no tools by which to get there. We were supposed to run a 7 minute mile, and do 10 pull ups in a row, but we were served mystery meat and hormone filled chocolate milk for lunch. The two just did not add up.
I watched as my friends slowly trickled off the school bus and stopped getting back on. Many of them had to stay home and take care of their younger siblings while their parents went off to work. I grew up on a small Native American reservation in the Pacific Northwest called Suquamish. The local casino was the source of much of the reservation’s income, as were family-run firework stands that popped up around New Year’s eve and the 4th of July. It was not uncommon to see parked trailer cars converted into homes, built upon with scraps of wood and cardboard. I will always remember the abandoned houses I walked by on my way down to JC’s market to buy ice pops in the summer. Overrun by blackberry brambles, I could hardly see the sunken in roofs and crumbling wood that used to resemble a doorway, or perhaps a living room I would imagine. Skinny dogs with patches of missing fur sniffed around the trash cans on the streets, searching for scraps of last night’s dinner.
Most people who moved to the reservation never left, my mother being one of those permanent residents. I observed generations upon generations of the same family line, most of whom lived the same narrative- born to a young mother, grew up with aunties, uncles, and grandparents, went to school for a while and then got pregnant with their own child and dropped out. Suquamish functioned in this cyclic way of life. The rainfall was heavy year round and playing outside was not very safe; therefore, exercise was a foreign concept to the Suquamish kids. As the dreary days dragged by, the older kids and adults would seek comfort at the local liquor shack, and once the booze ran dry, many looked to drugs in hopes to find… well in hope to find hope, I suppose. Thin and shaky-handed users convened in the wooded trail between my house and the elementary school. I remember following a pathway of cigarette butts one day when I was nine and finding two people shooting up. Before I ran away, I locked eyes with the young girl. Her soul must have slipped away through the needle in her arm, because all I saw was a slender silhouette, a ghost of a person. She must have been about 14. The vision of this girl still sticks in my mind like a photograph, 13 years later, like it was yesterday.
My family moved to Suquamish when I was five and my brother was three, at which time my parents were separating; my dad would soon vanish from our lives for what felt like a very long time. A time of stagnation and pain, but also immense growth and learning. That left us a family of three in a little house on top of Prospect hill. I learned to keep to myself a lot so as not to bother teachers or faculty at school–it seemed that most of them didn’t want to spend time on the poor kids who were going nowhere. Myself and the rest of the Suquamish kids were mostly ignored in school: many of us did poorly, had trouble paying attention, and many just stopped coming. Looking back makes me want to put the pieces together. Why were the poorest kids considered the troublemakers in school? Could it be because their parents could not afford nutritious food for them? And what about when they came to school, what were they being fed then? Sugars, fats, and processed carbs stuffed into little plastic wrappers. These were the subsidized foods that they had access to; the foods that were made cheapest by our nation, not by the laws of nature but by the decision of our government. These kids were the ones who had full-time jobs at home at the age of 12, taking care of their siblings, cooking, and cleaning. So maybe when they came to school, they just wanted to be the kids for once. Maybe they wanted to play, be loved, and be cared for.
Countless studies show the link between a mother’s affection in the early development stages of their baby to that of child’s success in life later on- health, happiness, creativity, and learning capacity. Unfortunately, mothers on the Suquamish reservation may not have had time to give their kids that love if they were single, working full time, and struggling to put food on the table. In addition to a lack of care, the Suquamish kids had no introduction to healthy living. Most of us did not play sports because our parents could not afford it. Many kids had no concept of nutrition, because their families were going to food banks and taking whatever they would offer. Cheap food was offered, and cheap food was unhealthy food. Perhaps this could have been counter acted if we had been given primary education on healthy living, if we had learned about exercise, and if we had above all been granted access to healthy foods. But that did not happen. Instead, we were served the cheapest and most processed foods and given very limited education on health until High School, by which time for many it was too late. Many kids had become obese, become heavy drinkers or drug users, become pregnant, or failed out of school and stopped coming entirely. Or worse, some kids had so much energy that they could not sit still for hours on end in a small metal desk. Instead of giving these children breaks to run around outside, to exercise and play as nature intended, these kids were pumped full of drugs that paralyzed them, silenced them, and turned them into little robots.
I believe that our school system has the responsibility to provide comprehensive support to all of its students, independent of their family’s income. This will mean making changes, adopting a more holistic approach to education, and recognizing that education does not come in a “one size fits all” modality, but rather it depends heavily on what the children are is getting outside of school, and what they are not. If we want our youth to succeed, we must empower them by teaching them how to be healthy individuals. Healthier kids will in turn to be the better students and citizens. Schools should be given support and funding to provide healthy food, health education, and overall more healthy student engagement. Of course, this change will take policy changes (food subsidization, etc.) and many dedicated people who are willing to fight for what American youth deserve. First and foremost, there needs to be a change in the food we are serving children in schools and the health education that comes along with it. Furthermore, we must work to extend food security beyond schools, to the community. This is no easy task, it will take a complete refinancing of our food system, reassigning subsidies to fresh fruits and vegetables instead of crops such as corn. I envision my children and their children someday at school running around outside, and then sitting down to a plate of fresh veggies, and whole proteins and carbohydrates, with a smiles on their faces. I believe our culture has the potential to propel our youth forward by giving them these tools to succeed- giving them the opportunity to be healthy, to break patterns of the past where poor kids get the poor food and rather make health accessible for everyone. Health for America is on the horizon, but we must push forward and be willing to make changes if we ever want to reach it.
Words on my Mind 