Suburban Valkyrie

When my daughter was in kindergarten at Sellersville Elementary School, I had a flexible enough work schedule that I was able to spend an hour a week volunteering in her classroom to help the gaggle of squirming 5- and 6-year-olds with free writing.

The weeks got colder as we moved into another Northeast winter, and most of the kids' clothing evolved accordingly. Shorts lengthened into pants. Short sleeve shirts into long-sleeve shirts and sweatshirts. Sandals into sneakers and socks.

Except for one little boy.

"Can you tie my shoe?" he asked, sticking out a sneakered foot.

As I scooched up his pant leg to rearrange the snarled laces, I realized that he didn't have any socks on. It was December in Pennsylvania. Not a good month to go about without socks.

"Where are your socks?" I asked him, with a mock scolding tone of voice.

"I don't have any," he said matter-of-factly, and sat back down to continue painstakingly penciling block letters into his free writing journal.

Now - I have two kids myself, and I know that not everything that comes out of kids' mouths is true. That's not to say they're lies - kids just don't always have full knowledge or grasp of a situation. It was perfectly possible that this little boy had socks and just didn't feel like putting them on - and that his parents chose to let him take ownership of that decision and feel the consequences of not wearing socks in winter.

Somehow, though, I knew that wasn't the case. This little boy, who lived within a two- to three-mile radius of my comfortable suburban home, did not have socks to wear to school in winter.

That was 2012, and the situation for many of my children's schoolmates has not only not improved, it has grown markedly more desperate.


Since 2012, the number of children in the Pennridge School District who are eligible for the free or reduced-price lunch program has surged from 14.2 percent to 23.3 percent. That means that nearly 1 out of every 4 students in this Bucks County school district lives in a family struggling to get by on 130 percent to 185 percent of the federal poverty threshold. With the poverty threshold for 2015 set at $24,250 for a family of four, that means an annual family income of about $32,250 to $44,860.

At my children's elementary school alone, the number of eligible kids nearly tripled between 2000 and 2014, from 6.6 percent in 2000 to 18.5 percent in 2013.

So much for the economic recovery.

Given that backdrop, it was with real sadness that I saw our local food pantry posting on Facebook today:





We will be heading to the grocery store to pick up some staples to donate to our local organization, Pennridge Fish, which concentrates its efforts exclusively on our local school district. We will drop them off on the way to my daughter's soccer game, feeling ever so thankful that such an organization exists.

If you want to know how families in your own school district are faring, check out Kids Count Data Center. And for a real eyeopener, this article from The Atlantic, on families who survive - barely - on about $2 per day is illuminating.