“The bleeding-heart liberals are to blame for attracting them (homeless) to the downtown business district by setting up all of their halfway houses right DOWNTOWN! Where normally you’d want to attract TOURISTS, NOT BUMS! ADDICTS! or CRIMINALS!” commented a disgruntled community member under a recent video of a homeless camp being torn down on HyannisNews.com. Though he is just one commenter on one post, he represents a larger trend: a growing disconnect between the homeless and the rest of the community.

Our community isn’t defined as simply the place where we live. As students, we are members of diverse and plentiful community. We are just as much a part of Cape Cod’s community as we are of Barnstable High School’s.

Over the past few years, the homeless population has exploded on Cape Cod. At Barnstable High School, we go to class with homeless students everyday. In a recent article, The Cape Cod Times reported that approximately 3 percent of the Barnstable Public School District, or 138 students,  identified as homeless in June 2015.This means that our own classmates, our teammates and our friends could possibly be in this demographic. As students, regardless of truly knowing where our classmates are coming from, we maintain a level of decency and respect in our school that would almost never provoke a student to call another student a “bum” or a “criminal” if it was discovered that he or she were homeless. If we can maintain this level of decency and respect in our school, why can’t we translate this to our community as a whole?

Homelessness is no longer something we can ignore; we all share a home on Cape Cod and we need to start treating each other as the neighbors we are. The recent decision to move the location of the NOAH shelter, a housing assistance program currently located in downtown Hyannis, has sparked a much-needed conversation about the treatment of our homeless population. It has also revealed a world that has been hidden from the public eye for so long. Long-term, shoddy campsites line the outskirts of wooded areas and people sleep on benches in front of gift shops in Hyannis. A current argument made against the NOAH shelter is that it detracts from the tourist attractions on Main Street, Hyannis. As a community that is largely dependent on the money generated by tourism, it is easy to understand why town officials and business owners would wish to have the shelter moved elsewhere. Our community’s current dilemma raises important questions our community needs to consider: do we value tourism more than we value the welfare of our neighbors?  How did we reach this point? What does it mean to help another person? How can we change the course of our future regarding the homeless?

As the homeless population has risen, so has the use of opiates on Cape Cod. Similarly, it is easy to think of drug addicts as lazy or weak, but it is harder to think of them as the victims of addiction that they really are. Heroin is cheap and easy to acquire on Cape Cod and it creates chemical, sometimes irreparable, damages to the brain. If we begin to think of heroin addiction as the health problem it truly is, more people could be helped and could possibly face a fate other than homelessness.

Likewise, mental illness is another factor that often leads to homelessness. We need to recognize that mentally ill people often do not have control over their own actions or inactions and need health care and protection. Without proper health care, mentally ill people may have no outlet to remain healthy. However, proper health care is often costly, and if a person is already scraping by, this may not be a valid option. This leads to an almost “snowball effect.” Problems grow unchecked and ultimately escalate to a point from which it is difficult to return. We need to make sure that mental health care is available and affordable in our community if we wish to help rectify the homeless problem.

Just as opiate addiction and mental illness are issues in our community, they are also issues in our own school. At school, it is sometimes difficult to discern whether someone is an addict or mentally ill, but they could easily become the people we see on the streets in the upcoming years. As a school community, we need to treat all our classmates with the dignity and respect they deserve and provide options for a smooth transition into the world after high school ends.

Perspective is the most important way to catalyze change in our community. It is easy to simply write off the homeless as lazy, uneducated criminals, but it is more difficult to think of them as the complex human beings they are and the precarious, sometimes cyclical, path that led them to their current situation. We need to do more to ensure that our classmates have the resources and knowledge they need to survive and flourish after they leave our school. With the wellness credit no longer required, it is now easier to avoid taking classes that discuss and teach how to remain healthy and conscious of our classmates’ lives outside of the classroom. While seemingly beneficial programs such as Challenge Day persist, one day a year is not an adequate amount of time to truly learn about and understand each other. The cycle of homelessness our community faces now will only continue if we don’t provide the necessary education and help students need to live stable and healthy lives.

As students, we need to constantly remain cognizant of the people in our community who need the most care and attention right now. We need to ensure that our classmates are receiving the proper education and care they need to survive. We need to become adults who would never call a neighbor a “bum,” an “addict,” or a “criminal” online or in real life. We need to do more.