Education to strengthen neighborhoods

A newspaper reported last week that the Homework Center is closing in a neighborhood where many at-risk kids live. The help center was a partnership between the housing authority and school district, who somehow managed to run this service, which was open 2 days a week, on $13,000 a year. The news story told about the end-of-year party that marked the end of this one-room place which has become a neighborhood center for children to come to for the past 13 years. One young man, an immigrant from Laos, started coming to the Center when he was 4 years old. He got help with his homework, became a tutor, and is now graduating from high school.

Another help center in the city closed 6 months ago. According to the article, the closings are due to lack of funding. A tutor at the center was quoted: “"It's really sad, if you want to know the truth. It's very sad. It's become a community center for this housing area, actually."

The story has haunted me for the past 5 days since I read it. What will become of the kids who got help with their homework there? Without the caring tutoring of the Homework Center, how many will ultimately fail and drop out of school – possibly ending up in trouble and incarcerated. The $13,000 a year pales in comparison to the cost of lost lives, not to mention the cost of incarceration. According to a Bureau of Justice report on State Prison Expenditures 2001, Minnesota spent $37,000 per year for each of the 6,514 inmates in state prisons in that year. And the number of persons in confinement has increased, as evidenced by recent reports of counties who are building new, larger jails. Jurisdictions who are unable to house all their prisoners are paying anywhere from $55 to $85 a day to other counties or states who so far have beds available in their jails or correctional facilities. Seems to me that funding the Homework Center is a bargain at twice this year’s cost.

I hope that our city will find a way to continue these neighborhood education centers – by providing adequate funds to organizations who are well positioned to work in neighborhoods. What a great place for an expanded community center partnership that might include a satellite library in these neighborhoods where at-risk kids and their families live. If we want to keep any child from being left behind we need after school programs, pre-K literacy, and homework help in the neighborhood where the kid lives.