Cleaning up

I am cleaning my desk. And it seems to be working so far. Understand, this is by no means done but there's been enough done to refer to it as a work in progress. This may not look like anything special to some of you, but those who know what my desk usually looks like, be sure you're holding on to something.

Now on to the desk drawers

My first real piece of business this summer is to attend our quarterly family foundation meeting. As I read grant proposals I'm struck by the overwhelming prevalence of policies that may sound smart when presented in a simplistic way, but are actually completely stupid from a societal point of view. Yes, I know this sounds like a thesis statement. Sorry, I work in a school.

One such policy is the existence of laws and regulations forbidding people and often the entire families of people who are convicted of crimes from public housing. I mean, on a completely surface basis I understand- no government aid to people who were manufacturing meth in their apartments. That makes perfect sense and I can't disagree that those people should be permanently barred.

But what makes less sense is, say, a 3 year ban for someone convicted of a misdemeanor. So what is such a person, especially say a 19 year-old, to do? Where can they go if their family lives in public housing? There aren't any good options. The family can move, which is a hardship. Or the person can return and hope they don't get caught, which is highly risky because it could lead to the entire family being evicted. And what else exactly? That's where the surface sensible/bigger picture stupid part becomes evident.

And how about this? In some places, eviction proceedings begin upon arrest. Does that make any sense at all in anything but the most brute force sense? Innocent until proven guilty anyone?

I get it. Housing authorities need to minimize crime in public housing. But can't there be any thoughtfulness about it? Anyway, that's one of the things we're talking about today, whether to fund an agency that works with authorities to be more flexible, especially with youthful offenders. We'll see.

I was also struck that in the 200-odd pages of grant proposals that I read, I only saw one mention of LGBTQ issues. Considering that we're working in a most general sense on issues of societal fairness, you'd think that might come up a bit more often.