In the song “Hot for Teacher,” Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth uttered the lyrics, “I brought my pencil!”  Many students at Hartford Public Schools can better relate to Alice Cooper singing “Schools Out,” where he sings, “No more pencils…”

During the course of issuing the HPS Welcome Center End Of Year Report for last school year, it was revealed that the number of students seeking assistance from Welcome Center due to a lack of school supplies, increased from the previous year by 21%!  The lack of school supplies was the ranked as number five on a list of the top reasons students access services at the Welcome Center, the others being homelessness, transportation, hygiene kits, and clothing, all which showed steep increases from the 2021-22 school year.

Teachers have previously reported on the district’s inability to provide students and/or classrooms with laptops (“No Devices Found”), which is a failure to hold fidelity to the spirit of an equitable education for all, but when students are seeking the assistance of a third-party run organization (created as part of the District’s Model of Excellence plan) for school supplies (undefined), it is an incomprehensible failure of the district on a basic educational level.  Despite a school budget increase of nearly a quarter of a million dollars between last school year and the year prior, some students are looking outside the school for help in obtaining a No. 2 pencil!

A larger travesty of justice and equity, which cannot be laid at the feet of ineffective school leaders, is gleaned from the Welcome Center’s report which states that students seeking assistance due to homelessness issues rose 35% year over year!  Last school year, 1,594 students accessed the Welcome Center’s services due to homelessness issues.  No Hartford city leader can stand before the community and boast of accomplishments when nearly two thousand students (and growing) in that community are homeless or living in an unstable environment.  Hartford leaders are quick to talk about successful “affordable” housing projects and their great work on refurbishing blighted properties, yet they utter not a word about the nearly two thousand students in Hartford who may not know where they are sleeping on any given night.

As I read this and other reports from Hartford Public Schools, all I can hear in my head is Marvin Gaye singing, “what’s going on, what’s going on?”