Opportunity to succeed has no price
When my 10th-grader came home on Tuesday and told me he needed $75 by Friday, I shrieked.
Fifteen dollars for a new calculator, $12 for a new music book. Those are the kinds of requests I’m used to getting from my children.
But $75?
“It’s for a leadership retreat I was invited to,” my son said.
Not only was this a valuable opportunity that would look good on the college application, but he was invited to go. He deserved to go.
So I moved a few things around in the family budget. And I found the money for him.
This is not unusual behavior. My children come home from school every other week needing $27 to enter a district-wide music contest, $47 for school fees, $40 to play baseball.
First, I shriek. Then I find the money – though not for every extraneous whim and need; our kids know by now that a college professor and a part-time teacher/writer will never find the money for $50 soccer bags, a horse like my daughter’s best friend has, nor even a round of soft drinks on the occasion we go out to eat. But we’ll always find a way to buy soccer cleats. We’ll always pay for piano lessons, Scout memberships and whatever other opportunities we think will give our kids an edge now and later.
Yet even as I scramble to keep up with the runaway-train costs of raising active children in a world full of options, opportunities and diminishing government resources for school activities, even as I wonder how we think we’re going to pay for college in less than three years, I also have to wonder:
What happens when families don’t even make as much as we do?
The weekend after Thanksgiving, our family drove to Chicago to see the department-store window fronts, decked out for Christmas.
On our way downtown, we intentionally drove through several substandard neighborhoods. I wanted the members of our small-town, middle-class American family to know how lucky we are.
“A lot of the kids living inside those buildings don’t have even what we have,” I told them as we passed mud-brown high-rises with barren yards and boards for windows. “And they probably never will.”
“Won’t those kids make things better when they get old enough?” my 12-year-old daughter asked.
“If their parents didn’t find a way to make things better, how are they going to know how?” I asked in return.
The fact of the matter is: The kids in some families get to go to life-changing leadership retreats.
The kids in other families wonder if the electricity’s going to be on at home so they can do their homework that night.
The kids in some families have an edge when it’s time to apply for college.
The kids in other families can’t afford $20 for a new pair of school shoes, much less soccer cleats.
And yet kids need extracurricular activities the same as they need school shoes. To be competitive for college. To challenge themselves. To stay out of trouble. To feel good about themselves. To find and hone their own special talents. To fit in, if nothing else.
Ironically, with limited family support and home enrichment opportunities, the kids in those high-rises might need extracurricular activities even more, to help “make things better.”
The members of Hall High School’s PTO in the wealthy community of West Hartford, Conn., know this.
The PTO holds fund-raisers like every other parent-teacher organization in the country. Only the members of the Hall High School PTO don’t use their funds to buy playground equipment or extra books for the library.
They give their money to kids who can’t afford fees for class activities, sports, field trips and other school-sponsored extracurricular activities.
That’s one way of leveling the playing field, I told the PTA president at my youngest child’s elementary school. Maybe we could do the same at our school?
In the meanwhile, the next time my children come home needing money for some school function or another, I will remind myself to be grateful.
Some parents have a meager budget to move things around in.
Others don’t know what a budget is.