Millions of Homeless Schoolchildren
by ERICA LIEPMANN, Causecast Associate Editor
Arianna Huffington was prepped to speak at the Get Schooled conference, addressing a crowd of influential politicians and philanthropists about education reform – but she ripped her speech to pieces. After reading the recent New York Times article about millions of American schoolchildren whose families have become homeless in the recession, she felt it was imperative to make this the topic of a new impromptu speech.
from the Huffington Post:
I was scheduled to give a speech at the Get Schooled conference on education reform yesterday, sponsored by the Gates Foundation and Viacom. My speech had been perfectly trimmed to fit the allotted time, and already loaded in the teleprompter.
Then I read Erik Eckholm’s moving story in the New York Times on the surge of homeless schoolchildren caused by the epidemic of home foreclosures. The story was accompanied by a photo that haunted me.
It showed 9-year-old Charity Crowell, of Asheville, North Carolina whose family’s home had been foreclosed on. As recounted by Eckholm, Charity had picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school, while vowing to bring her grades back up from the Cs she got last spring when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and forced to move into a series of friends’ houses and then a motel — and now a trailer, from which they are also facing eviction.
I’ve already been thinking a lot about the human cost of the millions of foreclosures taking place across America. But after I read this article, I dug deeper into the impact of foreclosures on schoolchildren. And I wanted to communicate the sense of urgency I felt to the thousand people gathered at the conference, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller, New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein, and Stephen Colbert, who emceed the event. So I decided to scrap my planned speech and talk about the crisis.
Photo by Ingsoc, flickr.
- Posted by Causecast
Related causes: Youth
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how did your speech turn out?