Children of Privilege Teaching the Lesson for a Change

A homeless man, ragged, hungry and a bit surly, seats himself at the local Bob’s Big Boy.

Customers are staring, whispering to each other, ill at ease. The man, it seems, would like to eat, but he has no money. He says he has nowhere else to go. He is not leaving.

What do you do--you the restaurant manager, you the person sitting in the next booth, you the police officer called to smooth things out?

The prickly ethics of real life are intrusive, often unwelcome. Many in this situation will decide to decide nothing at all. They will carry on, pretending that no dilemma exists. And it may not, for them. They may choose not to see.

The other afternoon I talked with a group of students at Placentia’s Tuffree Junior High School, kids in that awkward staging ground at the end of childhood, on the cusp of their teens.

I’ve talked with a lot of kids this age before. None of them, however, were quite like these.

“What we are doing is for us,” says Kiran Jain, who is 12 years old. “It’s our future too.”

“Maybe if lots of kids did this, the world would be better,” says Bryan McRae, 13.

“What will happen to our children if we don’t help?” adds Maria Tongko, 14.

These are some of the members of Kids Who Care, a club that the students formed on their own after a school field trip to the streets of Los Angeles. What they saw on Olvera Street, in Chinatown and on Skid Row tugged at their hearts.

Now they are teaching themselves, their families and anybody else who cares to listen that unpleasantness only festers when left alone.

The situation at the neighborhood Bob’s Big Boy hasn’t yet happened, as far as anybody knows, but it might, tomorrow or the day after that. So in a Tuesday night assembly, when Kids Who Care will present its first annual report to parents, the children will ask their elders, “What if it happened here?”

The parents will break into small groups, and each person will play a different role. Will the restaurant manager throw the homeless man out, or offer him a free meal? Maybe he could wash dishes in the back. Will the customers be offended? What if they don’t come back? Should the police officer cite the man for loitering? But how can you tell that he has no money to pay?

“They will be trying to come up with an equitable solution, since there is no perfect solution,” says geography teacher Jim Perry, the faculty adviser for Kids Who Care. “This is a very conservative area. It will be interesting to see what people think.”

Ethical theorizing, however, is but a small part of what Kids Who Care is about. Club members--whose numbers, depending on the activity, range from 15 to 50 students--are too busy for much of that. They’ve raised money, collected food and donated lots of their time.

For Thanksgiving, they wrapped hundreds of paper napkins around flatware to help the homeless on Los Angeles’ Skid Row eat a nourishing meal. They were there before too, bathing homeless children and helping with menial tasks. They are planning another trip soon.

The proceeds from one bake sale went to the local Meals on Wheels program and to help save the Costa Rican rain forest. They’ve thrown a party for mentally disabled children and adults and are sending a child in Somalia to school.

These are kids who are learning just how good it feels to give something back.

“This is the first year, so our expectations have been modest,” Perry says. “But this is unique. Schools must understand that, yes, you must learn to read and write, but that you must read and write to some end. . . . Where is the ethical compass leading to the real world?”

In the school’s north Placentia neighborhood, where the average household income is just a shade under $61,000 a year, the real world, for most junior high school kids, is mostly pretty nice.

The basics, here, don’t seem to be of much concern. It’s status--designer tennis shoes, hot clothes, a telephone in your own room--that is on a lot of kids’ minds.

So I asked these students why they look for ugliness, maybe put themselves at risk. On their first tour of Skid Row, for example, an armed undercover cop stuck to their side.

“Well, a lot of people feel that way,” says Kiran Jain, who is the club’s president. “They just don’t think we should get involved.”

One club member tells me, for example, that her mother has forbidden her from volunteering to help the homeless.

“She says I can’t go, because there are too many weirdos,” the girl says.

Other parents too have worried about the appropriateness of this type of social activism for children of such an impressionable age. It hints at radicalism, of charting a different course, far from the mainstream of Orange County life.

“The truth is the whole club stands on a foundation that is somewhat ambivalent,” Perry says. “The kids have not asked the school, or the parents, for any money. . . . And I’m not trying to lay anything on these kids. I’m not some old hippie who’s trying to recycle these kids. This has been their idea from the start. . . . But it will be interesting to see how much we can do without creating a backlash.”

The kids who care, however, seem little concerned about backlashes, or parental politics, or what those who chose not to get involved might think. They are testing the waters and learning how charity really feels.