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Every day, when many of our teachers get out of bed, they're in
the communities where they work. They come, most commonly, from the
same backgrounds as the children they
teach. A few, in years passed, were Head Start parents
themselves. That's why, for almost all of them, it's especially
wrenching to see children come to Head Start developmentally disabled in ways they may never be able to overcome.
Home-Made Crystals of Methamphetamine
("Meth," commonly called "Crank")
Last year, for the first time in the 22 years we've been serving children in
Tennessee's southeastern mountains, we had
to deal with a center in which every child -- every single one
-- came from a family devastated by the scourge of methamphetamine
manufacture and use. Without exception, every child in the center was
directly touched by meth:
- an uncle jailed;
- a father confined at home under house arrest;
- a sister selling herself for her cranked out boyfriend;
- the house next door exploding and burning to the ground, turning
the entire neighborhood into an instant hazardous waste site;
- children
arriving for class smelling like cat urine -- one of the telltale signatures
of a home where meth is brewed.
And, most horribly, the appearance of
more and more "meth babies," children so unhinged by exposure to meth
-- in the womb or as infants or toddlers -- that they literally get
lost while crossing the room trying to play with other children in the blocks.
This year -- despite the fact that the number of meth busts has finally
begun declining in the region -- we expect the problem to worsen. Why?
Because
some of our teachers, out for an evening stroll as they wind
down their days, can still catch --
somewhere in the breezes that drift through the darkening trees -- the
aroma of meth,
brewing somewhere up the road, over the ridge, down the hollow.
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