A master cookie thief, provocateur, trespasser and weird noisemaker of the highest order, JJ won my heart as he destroyed any semblance of serenity. The diminutive rascal toddled more than he walked, often rushing about like a blind man with his pants on fire: arms extend, balance tentative, direction erratic, but still demonstrating abundant enthusiasm that generally made me smile no matter what JJ did, which often involved getting into some sort of trouble. I was tasked to change his life, but don’t believe I did much except to inject a little light into the deep darkness of poverty.
JJ careened like a pinball off of furniture and other kids who rarely became upset as they would if some other kid invaded their space. It seemed everyone understood JJ required a different set of rules. Shorter than a yardstick, he often lived in his own tiny world, almost a cartoon character in behavior but very real all the same. However, JJ’s actual future in a less than hospitable larger world was more than slightly clouded, my responsibility established to improve daunting odds owing to JJ’s disability and misfortune. The brutal reality is that the little black five-year-old born prematurely with obvious disabilities would face many challenges. I tried to make his future a little brighter, but often felt and still feel I hadn’t the time, talent or resources to pull off any major transformation and could only make JJ’s days with me a little better.
Like nearly all youngsters just beginning to explore a wider environment, JJ hadn’t developed any sort of prejudice against the old white guy who gave him cookies, a condition I hoped he’d never acquire as far too many people of all races do, but almost always refreshingly absent in young people, one of the many reasons I spent much of my life working with them. JJ didn’t care what I looked like, and often pushed into me like a kitten needing his mother’s warmth. He knew I gave him snacks and Kool-Aid, smiled a lot and frequently tossed a small football with him outdoors most afternoons. This made me a star in JJ’s book. If my appearance resembled Frankenstein it would not have mattered a bit to JJ.
JJ didn’t have the coordination to frequently catch the ball we used, my soft underhanded toss almost always bouncing off his chest or head. Still, when he fumbled, he’d pick up the miniaturized football, run around in a tight circle a few times, and then send it back to me with a shot put thrust that never came close to where I stood, but I always tried to catch anyway, a good workout for both of us.
“Great pass,” I’d call out breathlessly, regardless of the ball’s trajectory, JJ pumping his small stubby arms in the air at my praise, a midget Drew Brees connecting for another TD as far as he was concerned.
Initially, I thought JJ was profoundly retarded. He often substituted sounds for words and had a vast and varied repertoire of weird noises he generated to signal approval or displeasure, but the more I got to know him the more intelligence I discovered.
One day he assembled a bunch of linking plastic blocks we had at the activity center, deciding to build a gun, which he proceed to “shoot” me with, until he decided to go for a different shoot. He repositioned a few blocks and announced, “Now it’s a camera,” and instead of “bang” he substituted what I thought an excellent imitation of a camera shutter in operation. His ability to differentiate and imitate impressed me, bringing about awareness of greater intelligence than I’d earlier suspected and instead revealed hidden talents all kids have to various degrees.
Unquestionably, what mattered most to JJ and all of the kids I spent time with was attention and affirmation from an adult, something so many of my charges needed desperately and rarely got to levels most of us would find acceptable. Many if not most of the kids in our program had absent fathers, overwhelmed mothers and myriad social problems directly related to poverty, poor choices by guardians past and present coupled to a society having little use or concern for the disenfranchised. I was supposed to alleviate these problems.
Learning LURA
“Resident Services Coordinator” it said on my office door, a pretty lofty title for a dispenser of snacks, organizer of board games, and cleaner of cookie crumbs, but the core mission was unquestionably important. My presence in the almost ecclusively low-income apartment complex was to improve the tenants’ lives and their environment, a pretty tall order given to a very short waiter.
It took me weeks to discover the legal underpinning of my new endeavor, even my supervisor didn’t know exactly what “LURA” stood for, and I was only told I needed to offer programs that met LURA requirements, whatever that meant. A lot of searching on the web finally revealed the acronym stood for “Land Use Restriction Agreement” which further mystified me as to how the use of land related to handing out free cookies and Kool-Aid, but eventually I dug up an actual land use agreement application.
As far as motivation goes on the part of Texas and apartment owners, the agreement, which I’ll quote verbatim partially to numb the sensibilities of every person who isn’t a lawyer “is given by Development Owner as an inducement to the Department to allocate Exchange Award funds as a condition precedent to the determination that the Development, as defined herein, satisfies the requirements of the State of Texas’s Qualified Allocation Plan and the allocation of low-income housing tax credits (the “Tax Credits”), pursuant to Section 42 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, and regulations promulgated pursuant thereto (the “Code”), by the Department. This Declaration incorporates the extended low-income housing commitment required by Section 42(h)(6) of the Code and is promulgated in accordance with the provisions of Chapter 2306, Tex. Gov. Code, (the “Act”), as may be amended from time to time.”
I’m sure JJ would understand, but for those of lesser cranial capacity, I’ll boil it down to simple English. By design, the apartment owner has a financial incentive to enter into a LURA and the state has various interests too, the provision of sufficient low income housing being one concern, and another motive directly related to my task at hand, and that’s an attempt to interrupt the cycle of poverty requiring low income properties in the first place.
After shredding a few more brain cells pouring over the typically obtuse legal language, I found the specific words I searched for.
“Service options include: Child care; transportation; basic adult education; legal assistance; counseling services; GED preparation; English as a second language classes; vocational training; home buyer education; credit counseling; financial planning assistance or courses; health screening services; health and nutritional courses; organized team sports programs, youth programs; scholastic tutoring; any other programs described under Title IV-A of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. §§ 601 et seq.) which enables children to be cared for in their homes or the homes of relatives; ends the dependence of needy families on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work and marriage; prevents and reduces the incidence of out of wedlock pregnancies; and encourages the formation and maintenance of two-parent families; any other services addressed by 2306.254 of Texas Government Code; or any other services approved in writing by the Department.”
After reading all that I looked around for my magic wand, couldn’t find it, and subsequently settled for tossing a football to JJ while we discussed how to refinance a house.
Seriously, I became involved with LURA a few years after retiring from my previous life as a full time educator and stumbling on an ad titled “Activity Coordinator working with youth part-time!!” I liked the enthusiasm if not the punctuation misuse of double exclamation points, but being one who always took great liberties with English grammar and usage, if not life in general, this only attracted me more.
I soon discovered my essential mission was simple on one end, almost impossible on the other, and that was to be open, helpful and welcoming as we made attempts to improve individual lives and then, ideally, the entire community. Simplicity being what it is, I think we did very well on the first part of the equation, but didn’t make much of a dent on the other, our efforts a spit ball tossed to stop a speeding poverty freight train going nowhere but down. Still, I must add that the people I met tasked with the same job were some of the nicest, most exceptionally caring individuals I’ve ever met. They worked hard and indeed did make a difference, but we need 100 times more like them in San Antonio alone and far greater resources to make significant inroads into changing the culture of poverty that permeates our country.
Lofty LURA language aside, the long-standing realty remains: Lose the birth parent lottery and the game’s far too frequently over for most born poor in American. All attempts to rectify this inequity have, on any large and enduring scale, failed miserably for a huge segment of our population of which JJ is a tiny part, a sub atomic particle in a vast cosmos of urban blight. We like to pretend this isn’t true, pointing to the minority who do climb up from poverty, but the data is clear. The majority of those born into poverty stay there. Upward social class mobility is extremely difficult to bring about and often nearly impossible. But my job, supposedly, was to help change this dismal picture as much as I could.
I’m not sure what I really expected from my new mission, only knowing I had a passion for the ideal. After a long career in urban public education where I worked directly with youth most frequently identified as living below the poverty line and “at-risk,” I harbored no illusions about our society or the plight of the urban poor, and had even less faith with programs designed to alleviate what can only be described as the huge chasm between the haves and have nots in America. All I knew for certain was that I missed being with young people as they always serve as something of a youth potion for me, Peter Pan really needed a good shot of rejuvenation. In retirement I grew rusty and lethargic and needed a change. JJ and his associates more than admirably provided the fountain of youth I sought while strangely extracting at the very same time every ounce of energy I possessed. I liken the physical and psychological processes in play as mysteriously complex as quantum physics, one of many things in this world I just don’t understand.
I didn’t want a full time job and had no interest in returning to a public school classroom that for me, and far too many teachers today, mutated from a place for creative magic into a dungeon of school “reform.” I’d experienced more than enough psychological whips cracked by ogres in suits who were possessed by accountability mania, tortured souls moaning about test data while many dungeon keepers really sought personal promotion, failing to see the million other things not tested that kids needed desperately, essential elements beyond measurement by multiple choice exams inflicted by profit seeking corporations. Not knowing how to effectively practice exorcisms in institutions prohibiting religious rites, I opted for a different ballgame entirely, and found one way out in deep social interstellar space made real by concrete, steel and asphalt, as was my previous domain, but with a significantly different mission focus and operational structure.
At my initial interview for the resident services coordinator (RSC) position I was most attracted to the open nature of the program and the fact that, generally, I wouldn’t be dictated to nor directly supervised and instead allowed the creative freedom to implement and design activities as I saw fit. This distinction, I think, is critical to understanding why so many teachers leave the classroom and most definitely why I did. I left teaching because I felt chained to the floor and needed creative freedom to survive. I just couldn’t go on as a prisoner.
I was tasked as an RSC to work with and for distinctly different interest groups, often at odds with each other, again nothing unusual to me after previous experience in the public school machine. As an RSC I served three masters: apartment management, low income residents, and my employer, a non-profit formed to provide services required by a given LURA and responsible for keeping the documentation required, a sub contractor, so to speak, for the apartment management company required under LURA to offer special programs for its residents.
My predecessor left under trying circumstances I initially attributed to incompetence but soon found much more to be of a case of being overwhelmed by all of the problems and tasks involved and extremely limited resources for remedies. Regardless of causes, I’ve never walked into a bigger mess, and I’d seen some pretty bad ones in my days as a teacher for impoverished communities.
On day one a large cardboard box holding rotting melons greeted me with a nauseating stench. The rotten produce, donated by the local food bank, had not been fully distributed and remaining melons dissolved into fermenting mush. My adjacent office closely resembled a junk bin organized via tornado. Every desk drawer and storage area was piled with miscellaneous odds and ends that needed sorting or disposal. For a while I thought when I finally got underneath the broken watches, dried paint pots and residual glitter I stood a good chance of finally finding Jimmy Hoffa.
We sifted and sorted, we being my wife Mary who I quickly drafted as a volunteer when it became obvious very early I really needed much more help to organize the disaster zone layered so deep I could differentiate previous administrations responsible. For weeks we plowed through sediment of half-eaten candy, broken toys, inkless pens, torn cardboard, hard glue, and other myriad mysteries no longer recognizable.
From the disorganized records chaotically strewn in various area of the office, I discovered most of my predecessors generally spent a few months on the job and then left for what I assumed were greener employment pastures or a trauma ward after leaving another layer of junk.
I’d been contracted for 20 hours a week, rarely worked less than 40 and often logged over 50, not to mention Mary who worked with me full time and eventually became responsible for most of the cleaning and organization. As she played amateur archeologist, used product tester and supply sergeant, I went about learning my new job, implementing programs and activities I could either create from scratch myself or select from a web-based collection provided by my employer, actually a very helpful resource.
Most activities could be loosely categorized as either adult or youth oriented and it soon became apparent that the adults rarely showed except for “gimmies,” being an activity, like our food pantry distribution, that provided something free with no obligation to return the favor or to learn anything new. Although I offered programs ranging from how to create a budget to GED preparation and resume writing, in three months only one adult showed up for any of these offerings, even though all activities were publicized by an activity calendar I was required to create and make available through posting in public places and distribution at the main office and also via numerous fliers I posted and distributed.
Now the kids were a completely different story. They’d tumble off the bus after school and rush madly into the youth activity room, happy to be out of school for the day and cranked up for action. Idiotically, I planned initially for structured after school tutorials, as had my predecessors, but it soon became obvious with so many kids zipping about what was really needed first for many was physical activity and fun. JJ and many of his peers weren’t about to sit down for long after just being released from school. It was party time, dude.
Not since my days behind a fast food counter during the lunch hour rush had I felt so much human pressure, a flood of over 50 kids all at once descended on us like the hordes of Genghis Khan. Standing four deep behind our make shift counter the kids scrambled and pushed while we tried our best to facilitate relative order. We passed out cups of Kool-Aid and cookies with machinegun speed, continuously emphasizing civility at what often resembled a K-Mart Blue Light special three days before Christmas, everyone scrambling to get the best deal.
Actually, it was some of these very behaviors we were obligated to improve, and for the most part, did to various degrees of success. Most fortunately, regardless of background and impoverishment, kids really do want to do the right thing, unlike a lot of adults who become mostly interested in what somebody can do for them.
I think it’s only fair to also mention, however, we did meet adult residents who were willing to volunteer and helped out when they could. Like us, though, they were over matched by compelling needs on every front, but it would be completely unfair to characterize many in the community as unwilling to work toward a common good; it was just that there were far too few helping hands and way too much work to be done.
What good was accomplished? Hard to really say, and even harder to quantify with charts and graphs as the God’s of Data often demand, but my gut says much good came about, even if my only evidence is anecdotal.
Jamal and his sister T’Donna are my best examples, two youngsters who wouldn’t even talk when we first met during the summer. Even when directly addressed with the broadest smiles possible, the pair mutely stared back at us as if we were greatly feared alien creatures and never to be trusted, and maybe initially that’s just what we were. But by the end of September we had to almost forcefully eject the youngsters every evening at closing time and found both very verbal and helpful once the walls came down. I spent a great deal of time working with Jamal’s anger issues, never learning what caused them, but would bet heavily his problems were the result of some kind of abuse that so many poor kids are forced to endure.
Eventually, I too became overwhelmed, the stress at least partially irritating a pervious medical condition I thought under control, and decided I simply couldn’t continue.
But I came back for another go, not to the same place as I knew I simply couldn’t do the job to a degree I thought it required, and instead took a position at another low income apartment community with far fewer residents, only 80 units compared to over 250 at my first complex. Same problems, but this time in more manageable amounts.
What did I learn? Many things, one of the greatest being how much a program like the one just detailed is really needed, but how underfunded and understaffed we were and will most likely continue to be, a tiny benevolent platoon facing the much greater armies of ignorance and poverty, a war we still need to win but seemingly either unable or unwilling to devote the far greater resources needed for a final victory in a most ancient war.