By: Nicolette Costantino| Opinion
“Personally, I was homeless for 6 months of my college experience and it was honestly the hardest thing I had to go through in my life.”
I was sitting at my dining room table on a Wednesday night, grading one essay from a stack of seventy-five from my College Composition classes, when I read those words. The assignment had called students to pick an article from the course textbook, summarize it, and respond to it with their own opinion on the author’s ideas. Needless to say, those words brought my reading to a dead stop, along with any other concerns I’d had about grading up to that point.
One of the reasons I fell in love with writing, and one of the reasons why I count my educator role as a privileged one, is the openness that writing can afford to the darkest, most secret, most taboo, most scary of subjects. We may not dare to open our mouths, but sometimes it is slightly less daunting to put words on paper.
“Every day was a new obstacle I had to go through. I had to come up with a plan of how I was going to eat or where I was going to sleep,” the student wrote.
TCC students face challenges that I never came close to as a college student. When I was in college, my biggest concern was deciding between the shepherd’s pie and the pizza in the cafeteria, whether to go to Ybor City with my friends at night or write an essay for class, whether to go to the pool or the beach in between class.
When faced with finding a place to sleep or completing a homework assignment, the logical choice is a foregone conclusion for anyone. Neither the faculty nor the College can blame students whose concern for grades falls low on the priority totem pole in the face of their major life concerns. But we can’t ignore the fact, either, that our students’ personal lives are inextricably tied to their academic performance. Regardless of whether they are college-ready in math, science, reading, and writing, if they don’t have a safe place to sleep, if they aren’t able to have regular meals, if they don’t have access to transportation, if they don’t have someone to watch their children, the outlook for their academic success is grim.
As I read my student’s words, “If one of the professors doesn’t have a helping heart to see what is going on before their eyes many students won’t even get the opportunity to use some of the school’s resources,” I knew that I was one of those professors who would not recognize a homeless student in her class. There are a host of resources at TCC for students experiencing homelessness, the Eagles Nest Food Pantry & Toiletries Closet, the Counseling Center, and Homeless Waivers through Enrollment Services, to name a few. But reading my student’s essay, it was clear to me that lack of awareness—including my own—and access remain the biggest barriers to students getting the support they need. They may not know about the campus resources available to them, and speaking for myself, not enough of those not experiencing homelessness know how to help.
But big change often starts off small. My sincere hope is that the more stories like this are shared, the more awareness can grow, and the more students can be helped. And my sincere thanks to my student who had the courage to share her story. I myself felt opened because this student had dared to open herself and share her story with me. Courage like hers is also what incites big change.
Nicolette Costantino is an Associate Professor of English and Eyrie Art & Literary Magazine Advisor.
