By the time my son graduated from high school last June, he’d taken advantage of many of the opportunities available to kids in Columbia, Maryland: Advanced Placement classes, JROTC color guard, the Science National Honor Society, baseball, marching band, concert band.

But at his school’s final concert of the year, an uneasy feeling gnawed at me. Don’t get me wrong. The strings, brass and woodwinds in the orchestra were amazing. And the guitar ensemble — 15 students all playing NIKI’s “Every Summertime” on red Yahama Pacifica guitars — brought down the house.

But something about all those school-issued, red electric guitars bugged me. Because just a short drive up I-95, a lot of kids in Baltimore won’t get these kinds of opportunities. After 26 years of teaching in Baltimore, I’ve never seen a classroom set of guitars in any school I’ve worked in or visited.

At a school where I work in Harlem Park, we push students to excel. Work hard, we say. Come to school. Stick with it. Focus. Annotate. Synthesize ideas. Cite evidence. Work collaboratively. Make good choices. Choose the right crowd. Show enthusiasm. Resolve conflicts. Think long-term. Develop a career plan.

Many students step up and meet these challenges.

But then the school day ends and students step out onto W. Lafayette and Gilmor, where vacant rowhomes radiate in all directions. Here on Gilmor, these crumbling vacant homes are a canvas of grief: Spray-painted RIP memorials mark more than a few of the brick facades.

This is a brutal block, and only a brutal society would send children to schools under such bleak conditions.

Last winter, three students walked one block to the afterschool, youth-empowerment program they attend. At the corner store, across the street from another school, a car pulled up. A man got out, masked and armed. He worked fast, robbing these students of their phones and small amounts of cash.

Imagine the next morning in, say, physics class. Your first assignment on this day asks you to find the top velocity of Space Mountain, a roller coaster at Disneyland. As you apply the formulas to calculate kinetic and potential energy (KE = ½mv2 and PE = mgh), would you be on edge, reliving the “stick-up boy” who’d put the gun on you the day before? Would you want to avenge the loss of a phone you have no way of replacing? Would the relevance of your physics class begin to feel farcically removed from the pressures of simply getting home each day?

Lazy, crude stereotypes about the poor could never begin to explain what’s happened to this community. Economic isolation, disinvestment, urban renewal, over-policing, municipal neglect and political indifference take a toll on kids. In school and out.

In Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, by America,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author unravels the interlocking systems that punish the poor. One of Desmond’s most compelling arguments implicates people like me and my neighbors: affluent and middle-class consumers who pocket more government aid than the poor do. Through tax breaks on mortgage deductions, 529 student loans, employer-provided health insurance, retirement accounts and capital gains, the “protected classes” gobble up government aid.

I appreciate my Baltimore City Schools health care plan, but by not counting employer-sponsored health insurance as taxable income, the government gives a lot of money to the rich and middle class — a staggering $316 billion in 2022. That’s a payout that does nothing to help workers whose employers don’t provide health care.

Homeowners are also treated generously. Mortgage-interest deductions cost the government $30 billion in 2020. Very little of this giveaway reached families in mortgage deserts like Harlem Park.

You’d never guess that kids in Harlem Park live in a nation with the highest GDP in the world. Unfortunately, it’s also a nation that rewards the rich, at the expense of the poor. Of the $1.8 trillion in tax breaks the government dished out in 2021, roughly half went to the wealthiest Americans, those with incomes in the top 20%.

By Desmond’s calculations, $177 billion could get all kids into safer, more affordable housing, reduce hunger, expand early education, improve schools and provide better prospects to millions of kids.

Reforming our tax system to lift kids out of poverty isn’t a huge sacrifice. And it ought to be something we can all agree on.

As a new school year gets underway, I keep thinking of all those red electric guitars and the talent those students tapped into and the winds at their backs that — with a little luck — will carry them on to other paths with new opportunities.

This is how it should be for all kids, no matter where they come from.

Adam Schwartz is a literacy coach with Baltimore City Schools. His debut collection of stories, “The Rest of the World,” won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House 2020 prize for fiction (http://adamschwartzwriter.org/).