Teachers quietly serve as first responders to poverty, By Alfred Lubrano, May 27, 2013, Philadelphia Inquirer: “At Roxborough High School in Philadelphia, teachers and staff use a school washer and dryer to clean the clothes of needy students. Learning and laundry, in fact, get done in several area schools, where teachers and staff also buy food, prom clothes, toilet paper, eyeglasses, and countless other items for children from families with meager means. This is on top of the hundreds, even thousands, of dollars that teachers spend each year on basic classroom supplies. In the Philadelphia area, teachers see themselves as first responders in the ongoing emergency of poverty. Many say that if they falter, they fail the children…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty