2008 Commonwealth Essay Award Winner

 

"THINGS I HAVE TAKEN FROM MY SERVICE WITH CHILDREN"

by Stefanie Millette '08

During my past four years, the myriad of roles that service learning has allowed me to play in the community has made me think broadly about the role that I will play in the world after graduating.

From my first IMPACT! Seminar session onward I began taking my service experiences home, where I would sit and search through course offerings and UMass programs to find educational paths or career goals that would allow me to translate my service learning into a career path. Working with children proved to be the best opportunity for me to observe the discrepancies between various populations. Children are blameless victims of circumstance, representing not only their own individual identities but also their social identities (Millette, Better the Child, Better the Village). They stand as living, developing testaments of the differences in education, health care, and family functionality that generally tend to split classes and races apart. Strongly affected by my experiences with ill children, toddlers from low income families, and foster children, my goals became focused around equal health and education opportunities for youth of all backgrounds.

After graduation, I will be a part of Teach for America in Saint Louis Missouri, where I will be teaching elementary school students for two years and hopefully connecting with their community outside of the classroom as well. It is a privilege to be accepted into such an exceptional program and I would not be prepared for it were not for my service learning experiences.

Over the past six years, I have worked closely with children and families of Camp Sunshine in Casco, Maine and the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut. When my experiences at the service sites began, I was so immersed in the emotional experience of interacting with children and parents who were watching loved ones pass away that I failed to notice some of the broader social pressures facing the families. Families were strained by more than medical problems. Insurance companies denied coverage to many patients with serious health conditions because of the high expenses associated with specialized physicians, treatments and medications, surgeries, etc. The time required to take care of a terminally ill child forced many parents to quit or lose their jobs, which terminated insurance policies provided by employers.

This fall, I kept thinking back on the families of camp as I took a course on health policy in the United States. The reality of the situation is that health is too often an issue of affordability- whether a family can financially support themselves medically. But I have been asking myself this question more and more every day: should health really be a privilege, reserved only for those who can afford it? I firmly believe that progress can be made in the coming years with the adoption of health coverage programs that guarantee basic health rights for all people, and I would embrace the opportunity to join the teams of people who make that happen. In fact, one reason I applied for Teach for America was its partnerships with public policy graduate programs. Thanks to these partnerships, I may be working to advance equal healthcare access within the next five years.

It came as no surprise to my parents when I first announced my thesis's subject of research, a topic which combines my passions for public health and children. My research is specifically focused on dependent children, a population of children that lack the advocacy and protection provided by families. The working title is Health of the Hard-Knocked: A Reflection on the Health Status of America's Dependent Children. I began thinking seriously about foster children in the United States and wanted to research their history and current health environment after I served as a volunteer counselor for Camp to Belong (CTB).

CTB is a week long summer program that reunites siblings who are in separate placements due to out-of-home care (e.g., foster care or kinship care). I've become immersed in the lives of the children in the program, serving monthly at mini-reunions called "Sibling Sundays". While it may be unprofessional to have "favorites", one of my campers from last summer has become quite important to me. He and his two brothers (I'll refer to them as "the Smiths" in this paper) live with their grandmother while their older sister and two younger brothers live in three different houses in other regions of the state. After learning that the Smith boys had never been to a hockey game or spent much time as UMass, I took them to a game and was blown away by their reactions. That night, they were overjoyed at the chance to meet the hockey team and the hockey coach, an opportunity graciously put together by Coach Cahoon and Todd McDonald. They could barely stay in their seats on the ride home, and the youngest one still insists it was the best day of his life. It's been two months since the game and they still insist on being "Team Minutemen" when playing with other kids at Sibling Sunday programs.

Even more exciting is the earnest discussion the boys had with another volunteer at the beginning of March, a conversation centered around what it will be like when they go to UMass. I look at how much that one night impacted the boys and wonder, "why can't more opportunities like this be made available to dependent children"? It's not just the luxuries like hockey games that are being kept from foster children- the lack of stability and community connections has a grave impact on a foster child's life. I've become engrossed in learning about the physical and psychological effects of dependent care on children, and the systemic inequalities that perpetuate cycles of substance abuse and child maltreatment. I hope to use the learning from my thesis to work with programs for dependent children wherever I settle, and someday become a surrogate or foster caregiver myself.

When I think about Teach for America, I am excited to learn more about children and the realities of income and race disparities in the United States so that someday I can be an effective policy advocate. However, it's quite possible that after Teach for America I'll be inspired to stay in the education field.

I see education as interconnected with systems that affect health care access and family functionality, and I look forward to any opportunity that allows me to work towards social justice. I've always seen teachers as community leaders (when effective), but I only started thinking about the effect of educator quality during my freshman year, when I spent three hours weekly in a Head Start classroom as part of IMPACT! I view education in the same light as I view health care access: it is my opinion that every child has the inherent right to both. At Camp Sunshine, the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, and Camp to Belong, I have encountered children from lower income backgrounds.

Back at home, my job as an art director for my town's parks and recreation program has allowed me to talk with children from what is generally an upper middle-class community. In the lower income camps, children were typically less likely to refer to school as a positive thing, and were more likely to admit that their grades were poor (Millette, Better the Child). When I mentioned UMass or college, campers in my hometown took it for granted that someday they too would go to college, while in the camps I served at the children considered college to be a real possibility in their futures. Race certainly plays a factor as well; the proportion of white students in the upper-income program was nearly 100%, while in the lower-income camps the proportion was closer to ten or twenty percent. I look at the two populations of children- higher income versus lower income, and it's terrifying to realize that already the children are on completely different levels in terms of their ambitions. Statistics show that the education gaps only increase as children turn into teenagers and then adults.

Teach for America will allow me to take a proactive role in working against this trend of disparity. Through the interconnectedness of service and learning, I know that my future experiences will continue to be as mind-opening and motivational as they have been during the past four years.