Some of Mr. Peace's fourth-grade students suffer from the effects of lead paint poisoning, or have learning and behavioral disabilities. Five of them started the year at a kindergarten reading level.
My lunch buddy, Annabelle, has a big family and a solid support system of women, but her mother works nights so they often miss each other. She often helps with child care for her sister's younger children. She's a pretty solid reader but she prefers math, were she to choose. She'd like to see the ocean one day, which is about two hours away, and she'd like to learn how to sew. I bring my sewing machine to school each week, and she's got it down—a tote bag and three friendship band bracelets to show for it. Sometimes we work on homework or other school projects before we share lunch, but mostly I'm there to be a consistent, fun, and positive adult in her life."The kids are challenged," Mr Peace says. "They might be stressed and they might not want to be there. So they might see you as just another part of the system that they don't like. But when you come at lunch and recess, you can just have fun.""I want to try new things," Annabelle told me. "Like sushi."
Marshall, the special educator, says that one student who is having a difficult time can take the entire classroom down for the day. "They just need a little concentration and calming and planning and a little care," she says. "We could have a person in each classroom who did that. We just don't have the resources for it, and now the district says that teachers and paraeducators might be cut. So instead of more help, our students will have less? We could easily have an academic person and a counselor person, a trauma-informed person in each classroom in the city. We need lunch buddies. We need parents. We need people who are trained." She, like many teachers, fear what might happen if students increase to 30 to 40 per class, as the turnover rate for teachers is already high."The best you're asking for that kid is that they will stay quiet for 30 minutes while you teach a lesson they don't understand. It's not a good scenario."
But what stuns me more each week during my lunch with Annabelle is her increasing ability to say what she likes and doesn't like. At first, she was pretty shy about her opinions and would politely spit the half-chewed bite of whatever into a tissue and gingerly toss it in the trashcan, quietly shaking her head. But now she expects me to have heard her. "This has lots of chopped-up peppers in it," she says somewhat disapprovingly. She's already told me twice before that she's not a huge fan. I hadn't heard her, or I conveniently forgot. "You and I, Miss Rachel," she says, "We got different tastes.""That's really what our job is in a lot of ways," Mr. Peace says, "If we're doing it best, is enlarging the narrative, enlarging the range of experience for these kids so that they're not just stuck. And unless they have contact with people coming from the outside, like a lunch buddy, it's not going to be there for them. It's not a given for these kids."Mr. Peace started the Lunch Buddy program because he, while attending Berklee College of Music, had participated as a mentor in a similar program.When he became a teacher, he approached Big Brothers and Big Sisters to get them involved with his class but never heard back. He had already enlisted his mother, fiancée, friends, and a number of people who are a part of his meditation and yoga community, The Peace Community Center, to help as academic volunteers his first year, and the lunch buddy program grew out of that."You have a kid like Danielle," he says, "with an attendance issue, but the days her lunch buddy is coming are the days I can almost guarantee she'll be in school. It's hard for her to make an effort to be here. She has to fight her parents sometimes to get to school. But she's more willing to put that fight up if she knows her lunch buddy is going to be here.""You have a kid like Danielle with an attendance issue, but the days her lunch buddy is coming are the days I can almost guarantee she'll be in school."