Who lives in your bathtub?

I just finished watching Beasts of the Southern Wild, an interesting movie, about a community of folks that find happiness in the depths of poverty. It led me to ask, "Who in our schools lives in our bathtub?" The Bathtub in this movie was a low lying swampy area populated by a mixed bag of folks on the other side of the levee. This is the other side of the other side of the tracks. All of our schools have kids that live in The Bathtub, and it is easy to point to the ways that living this way is hard, but I think that it is important for us to remember that all humans find happiness, a time to smile, and rest even in the face of the pressures of poverty. All of our kids know those emotions and long for more of them. We don't have to teach our kids that live in poverty what joy feels like, but we do have to help them feel comfortable so the natural joy of the human spirit has a chance to rise more moments than ever before.