We had fun last Thursday, bouncing along in the back of a farm rig with an AP photographer as Peter Ten Eyck chatted with an assemblywoman up front. The sky overhead was blue, the orchards spread out before us in verdant splendor. Our world seemed rich indeed.

We were tagging along on a tour made by the new State Assembly speaker, Carl Heastie. He’s from the Bronx and didn’t seem particularly at home in farm country but was making an effort.

When we asked what he’d learned on his tour, he gave an answer similar to those he’d given in other upstate locales: “As much as people try to talk about differences in different parts of the state,” he said, “most people care about the same things...education, infrastructure, and, in urban centers, poverty.”

It may not have been the lesson Ten Eyck had had in mind — he’d told us beforehand he wanted Heastie to see how food can be grown as part of the fabric of a community the way it is at Indian Ladder Farms — but Heastie’s lesson is a good one. Human beings — upstate and downstate, black and white, red state and blue state — have common needs and goals.

Something stuck out for us, though — rather like being poked with a sharp point. “And, in urban centers, poverty,” the speaker had said. Why the qualifier, “in urban centers?” We need to care about poverty here, too.

We had spent the better part of a week working on a story, for our back-to-school edition, on suburban poverty. True, it was hard to see last Thursday on the lush acreage of Indian Ladder Farms, but it is here, in our midst, and we really shouldn’t hide it.

The way to solve a problem is to, first of all, see it — then grasp it, fully understanding its depth and breadth. Only then can we come up with plans to help solve it.

The Guilderland Central School District is off to a good start. School leaders are aware of the numbers: 14.9 percent of Guilderland students are from poor households; that’s up from 5 percent seven years ago. Among Guilderland’s five elementary schools, Altamont Elementary has the highest percentage of economically disadvantaged students — 26.5 percent. That is more than one in four children.

Last month, Guilderland school leaders attended a session where they took on roles of poor people given hurdles to overcome. Guilderland’s superintendent, Marie Wiles, assumed the role of a 20-year-old single mother trying to attend classes while holding down a job.

“By the end, I had made it to school once,” said Wiles, “to my job a couple of times. We never had the cash we needed to pay rent. My brother stole, to pawn stuff for cash. It was stunning. We were all frustrated. It was hard to access the help in any integrated meaningful way.”

The exercise made the educators sensitive to what students and their parents living in poverty are up against. The next step is to translate that awareness to meaningful action in the classroom.

We know many teachers feel under siege as, in the last several years, they have been forced to teach in a new way, based on Common Core standards, and they are being evaluated in part on test scores that many of them feel are unfair.

Despite these very real encumbrances, we urge educators to put the needs of their students first, and that means understanding the difficult problems faced every day by students living in poverty.

A model program is underway in another Suburban Council school district, South Colonie, headed by Marybeth Tedisco, the principal of Roessleville Elementary School. Her teachers are working off of research gathered by Eric Jensen and formulated into practical recommendations for the classroom.

We’re impressed with Jensen’s approach as he itemizes seven ways children raised in poverty differ from middle-class students. One of the differences, posits Jensen, is in their “growth mind set” — students don’t try if they think failure is likely, if they feel doomed to a limited existence.

“Hope is a powerful thing,” writes Jensen.

Indeed, it is.

“ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that perches in the soul — /And sings the tune without the words —/ And never stops — at all.”

But what if that bird doesn’t sing for you? What if you’re a kid who doesn’t know where the next meal is coming from? Or what if your father lost his job and your parents fight so brutally you’re scared? Or what if one of your parents has disappeared from your life and the other can’t seem to make ends meets and is too worried or busy to pay attention to you?

Jensen has steps teachers can follow to help close the gaps.

But what can the rest of us who aren’t in the frontlines — not teachers or cops or social workers or doctors — do to fight the war on poverty, to help the children in our midst whose needs are profound?

Wiles described the convoluted array of services she experienced in the exercise simulating poverty as “almost counterproductive.” Of the role she played as a 20-year-old in a poor family, Wiles said, “Here I’m a school superintendent and can’t get to school. We had a roomful of educators who were stymied.”

So one of the things we can do is see that our lawmakers streamline the systems that are set up to help the poor, making them more easily accessible. Are you listening, Speaker Heastie?

A faculty member that helped set up the poverty simulation, Rebecca Gardner, told us that, besides the sort of help institutions like schools or churches offer the poor, individuals can make a difference.

“Parents can help other parents — drive someone to a doctor’s appointment, invite a child for play dates, share winter coats,” she said. “People need to know that other people care. That’s huge. It helps them have hope.”

There it is again, that essential word: hope.

“They’re born into this, or thrown into this. They lose hope,” said Gardner. “They don’t believe things will change, that life will be positive. They need to have a positive vision for the future.”

Let us make that a shared vision for the future. Those among us who are poor should have no fear of shame. Any one of us could lose a job, or fall ill, or suffer an accident.

We can let the bird of hope sound its sweet notes by helping those who are struggling in our midst.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer