Our Schools Need Adults’ Support

They walked down the street in the morning chill, backpacks slung across their shoulders. Their shoes all looked new, as did their jeans, shorts, skirts and haircuts. And the dinosaurs on their lunch boxes had clean faces.

But by year’s end, after they have been kicked and dropped and misplaced, the dinosaurs will look properly prehistoric. And the children will be older, wiser.

We went to the first day of school Tuesday at Brentwood Elementary on Spokane’s North Side, a first- and a third-grader in tow. It should be required that every adult accompany a child to school the first day of the new year. It’s a life-renewer, this ritual.

Though police officers walk the halls of some of our schools, the first day of school still brings with it promise and hope. And good, important things happen within school walls.

As we approached the front doors of Brentwood, a sixth-grader ran up to her friend and touched her arm. “A million things have happened!” The two girls sauntered in the doors, whispering their summer secrets.

We envied the ritual of starting over each fall. A new teacher, a new desk, new schoolmates, a chance to make over your image - class clown one year, class leader the next.

As adults, we don’t get that opportunity to start anew each September. It usually takes a life crisis to begin again, to change.

Unfortunately, our schools have become physical and intellectual battlegrounds. Kids seem more aggressive and more daring. Parents clash with one another, teachers and administrators over what should be taught, what should be withheld. Books are under constant threat of being banned. The home-schooling phenomenon has taken off in the Inland Northwest as parents have grown more and more disillusioned with public education.

Schools, both public and private, never before have needed more support from adults. We can help with simple acts such as slowing down at crosswalks and ducking into school-sponsored carwashes on Saturday afternoons. And with bigger acts, such as voting for school bond proposals and volunteering our time and talents.

Visit a school on the first day. Look at it, smell it, feel it the way a first-grader does and you will remember once more that schools are sacred places of learning. Enter with respect.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rebecca Nappi/For the editorial board