Columns 2003

Not a great week for Alaska’s kids

Last week was a bad week to be a kid in Alaska.  All the headlines made it clear that we, as a society, were failing our kids in just about every way possible.

Our schools seem to be failing them.  The state’s Children’s Services, supposedly a safety net for kids in dangerous homes, seems to have more holes than net.  And a kid in Kivalina, a town that has already had enough publicity about problems with violence at its school, has a drunk kid show up with a shot gun and point it at the principal.

Yep, all in all not a great week for Alaska’s youth.

Of course, all the schools that received failing grades had any number of reasons why things were not as bad as they seemed. And some of those reasons were fairly legitimate. It seems as though the standards set for the No Child Left Behind program made it easy to fail and hard to succeed.  One bad mark and bang, you’re a failing school.  Even if all that happened was that not enough kids showed up to take the test, you failed.

Children’s Services didn’t have it much better.  A miniscule portion of its cases was randomly selected for review and those results were extrapolated to indict an entire agency.

But the fact is that despite the exculpatory evidence presented by officials of these agencies, we have seen study after study come up with the same results.  Either all these studies are simultaneously wrong or we might just have some systemic problems that need to be addressed in how we care for some of the most vulnerable members of our society.

When it comes to the schools, I find myself wondering where are the parents.  If the schools are failing so badly, why aren’t parents showing up in droves at school board meetings and demanding that their children receive a real education.  Could it be that for some parents this is just more effort than they want to make after a long day at work? Or are they tried of fighting a system that seems so entrenched that a nuclear warhead exploded in its center could not produce movement?

I know where the parents are for the Children’s Services kids. They are on a waiting list somewhere in the ether of the system.  They are waiting for a substance abuse treatment program, or an anger management program or a parenting program or low income housing to become available.  They are waiting for their name to get to the top of the list for the services the state is telling them they must access before their children will be returned.

But it’s hard to convince legislators to put money into programs that will not show results in time for the next election.  It’s easier to build more jails and put more people in them. Because then when you run for re-election you can point to the number of criminals no longer stalking our streets thanks to the jails you built.  It’s harder to get people excited about building treatment centers that will help families reunite with their children so that ten years from now those children will not be filling our jails. 

Politicians need programs that provide instant gratification because they are dealing with a generation for which, to paraphrase from “Postcards from the Edge”, instant gratification just isn’t fast enough.

That kid in Kivalina could possibly have come from a good solid family and just slipped up one night, got drunk and had easy access to a gun.  It’s more likely, however, he was showing evidence of problems for a long time.

But we don’t have the money or programs to handle kids till they act out so badly we lock them up. And teachers already don’t have enough time in a day to do all they are tasked with doing before they can even start to teach. Asking them to run interference for troubled kids on top of their current load is just ludicrous.

Alaska, like so many other places in this country, tries to skimp on solving these problems till they become so large we can no longer ignore them. Then we put the problems in bigger and bigger jails.

Wouldn’t it be nice if just once we all looked a little further ahead than the end of our noses or the next election and actually tried to institute programs that would stop these problems before they started?