Forum editorial: Children the victims of failures
The Forum - 03/12/2003
Reporter Cole Short’s stories about homeless children in Moorhead (Forum Sunday and
Monday) revealed a societal
failure that ought to energize decent people. He described the children as “a hidden
and silent society.”
Short’s reporting found that since 1995 more than 1,000 homeless children have lived
in shelters, cars or with family
and friends. The count reached a record 151 children in January, according to the Moorhead
Public Schools homeless
program.
Not only are the numbers disturbing, but the apparent endemic nature of the problem is
troubling. The program to
help homeless youth was started in 1995, and the average number of homeless children has
been 125 a year. It
appears the school district is serving a mobile underclass of families that are unable to
care adequately for children.
Let’s be clear: It’s not just Moorhead’s problem. It’s a Fargo,
Moorhead, West Fargo, Dilworth problem.
Homelessness is not restricted by city boundaries. But Moorhead has had in ! place for
nearly a decade a Homeless
Children and Youth Project that has tracked homelessness and provided support for homeless
children when they
are most vulnerable.
The program does good work, but it only treats the symptoms of a deeper malaise. By the
time homeless children
are identified by the school district, their lives already have been altered for the worse
by circumstances that led to
homelessness. The roots of homelessness run deep and branch into everything from abuse in
the home to
addictions to the hopelessness of a jobless family.
It’s easy for observers of the situation to pontificate about “those
people” or “pulling yourself up by your
bootstraps.” But those attitudes reveal an all-too-comfortable misunderstanding of
the vulnerability of children and
teen-agers. The situations in which children find themselves most often are not of their
own making. In every sense
of the word, they are victims – of parental neglect; of government inaction; of the
reluct! ance of most churches to
get meaningfully involved; of the private sector’s attention to its own priorities.
Moorhead’s effort to help homeless children adjust to school and community is
laudable. It’s a model for other cities.
But the perennial condition of a population of homeless children is an indictment of the
broader society’s failures.
Forum editorials represent the opinion of Forum management and the newspaper’s
Editorial Board