Recession reality sets into Dulaney

Senior, Jon Meltzer started looking for a job in June 2009. He applied for positions in restaurants including PIVS, Gibby’s, and more. Four months later, he is still on the hunt. Meltzer remembers a particularly shocking experience while interviewing for a bus boy position at Ocean Pride Seafood in Lutherville:
    “So, I go in, give them my resume and stuff from school. Then this guy comes in behind me. He’s at least 35 years old, in a business suit and everything. I go, ‘Are you applying for a manager’s position?’ And the guy goes, ‘No, a bus boy. I lost my job at an accounting firm in New York.”
    Meltzer believes that because of the recession, adults are taking jobs from teenagers, or that businesses are no longer hiring. This is the exact economic effect that Dulaney economics teacher Chad Boyle warned would hurt students.
    “What’s going to impact students are [decreasing needs for] service jobs. Restaurant [spending] is the first place people cut back,” says Boyle. He specifically notes that jobs in fast food chains and country clubs will be the first to decrease. The number of hosting and bussing positions, as Meltzer experienced, will also drop.
    Meltzer’s story is just one example of an increasing trend that spells trouble for students. An article in The New York Times states that in August the teenage unemployment rate “was 25.5 percent, its highest level since the government began keeping track of such statistics in 1948.”
    The unemployment crisis is not only affecting Dulaney students. Some parents are facing the same problems. Dulaney principal Patrick McCusker says, “We are sensitive to the fact that unemployment is up ten percent. We’ll work with students on a case by case basis.”
    The county has methods to provide assistance to the increasing number of families who qualify for a form of financial assistance. Karen Levenstein, the Director of Food and Nutrition Services for Baltimore County, works in collaboration with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to provide affordable meal plans for students of such families. To qualify, parents must either already receive financial assistance from a government program or have received a paycheck that classifies them as part of the “working poor.” Individual students who are considered homeless automatically qualify.
    “What we have seen is a rise in children who need the meals because of the economy [and because their] parents have lost their jobs,” Levenstein says. The individual cases “are permeating throughout the whole area. We are too happy to have options for students.”
    Pupil Personel Worker David Greenberg says that at Dulaney, “There has been a marked increase in students registered as homeless within the last two years as compared to previous years.” He partly attributes this rise to the economy, specifically regarding job losses and home foreclosures.
    Additionally, economic conditions are affecting enrollment. With over 1,860 students, about 20 more than last year, McCusker attributes the increase in part to a number of families “who were looking to leave private school.”
    A freshman at Dulaney, Trevor Morgen-Westrick had been at Gilman, a private school, for nine years. His parents, both doctors, “lost three-quarters of their patients after 25 years of private practice.” Because insurance companies were not covering the private rates, one of his parents was forced to work at a hospital. The freshman says that the expensive tuition, in addition to their dislike of the “daddy’s little boy” Gilman student stereotype, led the family to Dulaney.