Editorial: Persistent Poverty, Greensboro News & Record (8.20.11)
Nearly one in four children in North Carolina lives in poverty and the number keeps growing.
They are the youngest casualties of the Great Recession’s double-whammy of unemployment and housing foreclosures.
And the homelessness and hunger that often follow could have a lasting impact.
A study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation estimates that foreclosures have disrupted the lives of 90,000 children in the state. Another 250,000 have been hurt by one or both of their parents losing a job.
While the survey showed some progress with more children staying in school and fewer teens giving birth, the bleak economy gave our state one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. Adding pain to that misery is a new report on hunger that lists Winston-Salem as the worst metro area in the U.S. for the number of families struggling to feed their children (nearly 35 percent). Greensboro-High Point placed 17th at 28.4 percent.
When schools open next week, meals served in the cafeteria may be the best, and perhaps only food some will get all day. In many Triad schools, more than half of the students receive free or reduced-price meals.
That more are staying in school is encouraging because educating them for tomorrow’s workforce is central to breaking poverty’s stranglehold. Slashing school budgets and withholding funding for at-risk kids may seem the expedient thing to do, but it will have a lasting, costlier outcome.
Instead, there must be more emphasis on public education as a way out of poverty. That means identifying and mentoring children unable to keep pace with their peers. It means adequately funding the state’s pre-school program. And it means helping parents better cope during hard times to hold families together.
The Rev. Mike Aiken, executive director of Urban Ministries, says the vast majority at his emergency shelter are families. And officials with the Second Harvest Food Bank, which delivers food to 18 Piedmont counties, told the Winston-Salem Journal that its shelves often are bare. The more fortunate among us can help by contributing money, food and time to any of the numerous community agencies and churches that provide assistance to people in need.
Unfortunately, hungry families may not be using all available resources. State officials say that about 500,000 North Carolinians who are eligible for the federal food stamps program have not applied. Enrolling might bring at least temporary relief.
Most importantly, politicians in Washington and Raleigh who talk a good game on job creation need to back it up with action.
Educating our young and putting the hard-core unemployed back to work are the best ways to fight poverty.