Poverty, homelessness climb among US schoolchildren By Debra Watson
30 March 2011 In
the two years since the onset of the financial crisis in the fall of
2008, the number of children living in poverty increased from 14 million
to 16 million, the US Census Bureau reports. The US government
estimates that 25 percent of children in America will soon be living in
poverty. On the March 6 installment of the weekly CBS television news program
60 Minutes,
reporter Scott Pelley opened with these harsh statistics. He said of
the jump in the numbers of children officially in poverty, “that is the
fastest fall for the middle classes since the government started
counting, 51 years ago.” The figure of one in four
children in poverty is itself is an underestimation. The figure is based
on the official US poverty rate of $22,000 a year for a family of
four—a ridiculously low sum for a family to live on. The program
cites another record statistic: a total of 1.5 million children, the
highest number since the Great Depression, are currently homeless in
America. The 13-minute segment of the CBS TV newsmagazine’s
weekly program focused on the plight of the rapidly growing population
of homeless children who live in the Orlando, Florida, area. Hundreds
of homeless families are crammed into tiny rooms in the aging motels
that line one of the highways leading to the famous Disney theme park.
School buses have set up regular stops there for the children. In
the “60 Minutes” segment, several families are interviewed about their
fears of being split up in shelters or about their profound sadness in
having to part their children from themselves and each other, sent out
to be cared for by different relatives. Such arrangements recall the
desperate conditions of the Great Depression. An 11-year-old girl
in the one of the families featured reports the five-person family—mom,
dad and three children—at one point lived in their van. The parents
were both laid off from jobs that paid $20 an hour. After begging on the
street corner for a job, the father was able to get enough work to keep
the family from being evicted from a two-room motel suite. The
girl explains that they had already lost all their possessions, toys,
photos—her teen-age brother said he lost his scooter and video
system—when the family’s storage space was repossessed and the contents
sold. The brother has dropped out of high school to look for work now. In
a moving segment, Pelley faces a group of children sitting on
bleachers, in what looks like the staging for a typical elementary
school class gathering. When Pelley begins to quiz them, it is
clear that these children have worries far beyond whether they are up to
date on their homework. When asked how many have ever gone to bed
hungry, a large number of hands go up. With tears in their eyes, some of
the students describe what it is like to be hungry or what it is like
trying to go to sleep with their stomachs hurting from hunger pangs. Pelley
asks the children from families with incomes low enough to receive free
school lunch, “How many of you have had the lights turned off at your
house?” Nearly every hand in the room goes up. In another part of
the segment, the Seminole County, Florida, director of homeless student
services says the number of homeless students in the county goes up
relentlessly—5 to 15 more students ask for homeless services every day. Beth
Davalos says the number of homeless children is not the only thing on
the rise. So is the duration. She tells Pelley that eight years ago,
when she started the program, homelessness lasted two to three months,
but now it goes “three months, six months, a year, or two years. This is
when these children are developing who they are, and their foundation
is broken.” Unfortunately, the CBS news segment was most notable
because such reports are so rare as to be remarkable on US television.
The dearth of coverage is in sharp contrast to the deep decline in the
living standards of the working class. The wide dissemination of such
true stories to millions of people would make it easier for workers who
are suffering the consequences of the devastating economic recession to
come to a realization that their problems are social, and not their own.
Recently,
the National Alliance to End Homelessness reported that between 2008
and 2009 a majority—31 of 50 states and the District of Columbia—had
increases in their homeless counts. The nation’s homeless population
increased by approximately 20,000 people from 2008 to 2009, a 3 percent
increase. There were 656,000 homeless in 2009, up from 636,000 in 2008. Its new
report, State of Homelessness in America,
highlights that nearly 4 in 10 homeless were living unsheltered, on the
street, in a car, or in another place not intended for human
habitation. In Wisconsin, twice as many people experienced homelessness
without shelter in 2009 as did in 2008. Key indicators of housing
crisis tracked by the group went through triple-digit increases in
vastly disparate locations. In Louisiana, (where Hurricane Katrina and
flooding ravaged New Orleans nearly six years ago), the homeless
population, sheltered and unsheltered, doubled. The 660,000
homeless reported for 2009 does not include the doubled-up population
(people living with family or friends for economic reasons). That figure
increased by 12 percent to more than 6 million people from 2008 to
2009. In Rhode Island, the number of doubled up increased by 90
percent; in South Dakota, the number more than doubled. In the course of
a year, the estimated odds of experiencing homelessness for a
doubled-up person are 1 in 10. Among subpopulations, the largest
percentage increase was in the number of family households, which
increased by more than 3,200 households, a 4 percent increase. Also, the
number of persons in families increased by more than 6,000 people (a 3
percent increase). In Mississippi, the number of people in homeless
families increased by 260 percent. A section of the report looks
at the causes of rising homelessness. The fall in wages and other
supports at the bottom of the income scale is notable. While real income
among all US workers decreased by 1 percent in 2009, poor workers’
income decreased even more, dropping by 2 percent to $9,151. Poor
workers in Alaska, the District of Columbia, Maine, and Rhode Island saw
their incomes decrease by more than 10 percent. In the course of
a year, the estimated odds of experiencing homelessness for a young
adult aging out of foster care are a staggering 1 in 6. As to
homelessness among young people as a whole, the report notes: “It is
widely agreed upon that there is a vast undercount of the number of
young people experiencing homelessness. Underscoring this is the fact
that 35 percent of all communities reported that there were no homeless
youth in their communities in 2009.” While the states with the
greatest growth of homelessness were Florida, Nevada and California, the
Michigan homeless education program released data showing marked
increases there in the number of homeless students enrolled in public
school districts. From 7,500 in the 2007-2008 school year, the number of
homeless students in Michigan rose 300 percent, to 22,673 in the
2009-2010 school year. The report cites “the current economic
conditions in Michigan, and the effects of these on families in our
state, particularly, high unemployment and foreclosure rates” as the
major causes for the rise. In four western Michigan counties,
Gratiot, Ionia, Isabella and Montcalm, the number of homeless students
doubled in less than a year from 666 last spring to 1,242 homeless
children in January, 2011. The Daily News, a local
newspaper serving Greenville, Belding and Montcalm Counties in western
Michigan, quotes Victoria Simon, principal of Threshold Academy in
Orleans. She said the number of homeless children was high during the
last school year, 11 percent, but now it is up to 15 percent of the
school’s population. Simon notes that the increase is “extraordinarily high,”
and the school’s figures don’t even count families who are doubled up.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/chil-m30.shtml
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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