If you’re sick,

Or overweight,

It may be tough,

To graduate.

Public schools are a popular topic for newspapers and magazines. I’m sitting surrounded by clippings. Connecticut headlines, paraphrased here, shout out: “Families Shut Out of Pre-K,” “Hartford School Choice Programs Disappointing,” “Magnet Schools Short Of Money,” “Deficits Plague School Lunch,” “Uniforms Are Popular,” “Another Desegregation Plan,” “Fiscal Disaster Awaits Urban Schools,” “Cash Rewards For Pupils and Teachers,” “Black Students Lag In A.P.,” ”Cops In Hallways,” etc.

Usually the news is bad, but often with cheery reference to a hopeful new heroic superintendent or an inspired program.

Maybe THIS one will lead us out of the darkness. Just like the uplifting “No Child Left Behind,” which unfortunately turned out to be little more than a slogan.

And many programs have indeed been helpful: Uniforms, boot camps, breakfasts, lunches, magnets, busing, cops, and others have each alleviated some nagging symptom.

The latest, paying kids for learning better and teachers for teaching better may help too. Let’s hope.

But perhaps scariest of these dismal headlines is the shortage of seats in Pre-K.

Rare is the educator who challenges the importance of starting kids early, especially those from homes with a stimulation deficit.

Our own family has been painfully observing a toddler relative suffer in just such a sterile environment.

She may never catch up. Were it not for inconvenient statutes to the contrary, there might have been a kidnapping by now. Unfortunately, in the poverty-ridden wastelands of many American central cities, there is often no sensitive extended family even to lament the mental destruction that is daily taking place.

Rich folks commonly buy outside stimulation for their kids not long after the cord is cut. The poor lack that luxury, and often lack even the grasp of its importance.

So too does our nation. Education, for all the rhetoric of political campaigns and the heralding of brilliant new techniques, remains overwhelmingly a local problem.

States give a try at balancing out school funding and they impose basic standards, but it’s still local school districts that do the heavy lifting.

Whether that includes serious pre-school stimulus or not generally depends on the wealth of the home folks.

Health and nutrition play a major role in learning too. Hyperactive or overweight or diabetic or hungry kids are not top picks for successful school careers.

That’s why Congress has funded (or under funded) breakfast and lunch programs, though these are as often designed to assist agribusiness as children. Head Start, too, that most commendable of preschool initiatives, has found itself a political football and many times not even part of the school system.

So a large element of the fix for urban schools lies outside the superintendent’s control. And the job simply can’t all be done with teacher bonuses, paying kids to study, smart uniforms, cops in the halls, and pretending to desegregate.

Without universal health care and enough income for decent nutrition, the education problem is plainly not going to go away.

Without the stimulus of skilled childcare professionals for kids whose parents can’t provide it, low-income public schools will remain high-dropout public schools.

Is our nation willing to commit to such costly basic social expenditures in order to give our schools a chance?

Well, we’re already signed up for some pretty big expenses just now, like wars, bailouts, and Pentagon spending.

Probably can’t fit in any more big commitments quite yet.

Education will most likely have to continue in the back seat, living off spurts of funding and flashes of insight.

The dream of universal graduation needs to be based on universal health care, universal income support, and universal preschool.

Without these, all other programs are band-aids and our schools will stay sick.

Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut.