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Posted on 01/10/2008 3:42:37 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
One out of three school-age children in Milwaukee, WI lived with a family in poverty in 2005, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released Wednesday.
Milwaukee ranked sixth highest overall among the nation's 70 largest school districts; only Cleveland, New Orleans, Detroit, Fresno, Calif., and St. Louis had higher percentages of children living with families in poverty.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said creating jobs, resolving school-funding issues, getting more fathers involved in raising their children and getting kids to stay in school are key elements in reversing poverty's grip on the city.
"I literally go into classrooms and say, 'I'm Tom Barrett, I'm mayor of Milwaukee, and I'm begging you to stay in school and work hard,' " Barrett said. "We know that's the long-term solution. The short-term solutions are job retention and work force development."
Overall, 12% of Wisconsin children ages 5 through 17 lived with a family in poverty. Within many school districts in southeastern Wisconsin, the rates were extremely low. Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties ranked among the nation's 28 counties with the lowest poverty rates of school-age children.
But Milwaukee continued to struggle, with 38,785 of 117,884 school-age children living with a family in poverty, up nearly 10,000 kids from the 2000 census.
Brother Bob Smith, president of Messmer Catholic Schools, said he sees the impact of poverty every school day. Eighty percent of the 1,500 students in Messmer schools are eligible for free school breakfasts and lunches, he said.
Recently, one student missed classes because her family was homeless and she couldn't get her uniform washed, Smith said. He said there are numerous cases of children who come to school in need of warmer coats or money for bus fares.
"One of the first things is to make sure we understand what poverty is," he said. "On one hand, it's not a death sentence. I grew up in Chicago in poverty. You deal with gangs or you deal with being made fun of because you don't have the latest shoes, or you're eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch.
"On the other hand, if you're able to really get kids to believe that there's a future and there's hope, and so many educational opportunities, you have to let them know they have to earn those," he said. "You don't get scholarships just because you're poor or you're black. You get them because you earn them."
William G. Andrekopoulos, superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, said poverty affects schoolchildren in a range of areas, including academic preparedness and health.
"We need to get kids in quality day-care programs so they can deal with the deficits children have, like vocabulary development," he said.
He said many impoverished children in the school system are in desperate need of care for physical, mental, even dental health. Children who are either homeless or who are often moving from home to home - and school to school - also are at risk, he said. Recently, one school principal told him that a child was acting out in class. It turned out the child needed a blanket because he was sleeping at night on a pallet.
"This housing thing is probably bigger than I ever know or can imagine," Andrekopoulos said.
School kids living in poverty also may be in unstable family situations, he said.
"When kids live in poverty, there is such a disarray with who really is the primary adult in the child's life," he said. "A number of people are struggling to make a living, (working) multiple jobs; their own survival is critical. That becomes an issue with the family. The whole parenting thing is an issue. It is a problem for the school system. We don't want to use it as excuses."
The Horror! The Horror! Yeesh. More ground-laying sob-story articles for money-grubbing politicians.
At least they kind of, sort of, might have, maybe did hit on a few of the reasons these kids are in poverty in the first place. I'll give them credit for that.
The people who made Milwaukee a great city don’t live there anymore.
Not just blue. The darkest of blues. I love PB&J. As do my kids.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and guess that ebonics is the predominant language spoken there. They need a visit from Bill Cosby.
I grew up "poor" in a non-english speaking household. I watched black and white television and read tabloid newspapers to learn the language and culture. These crybabies are f'ing pathetic.
MA cities with serious problems are Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, New Bedford, Fall River, Springfield, Holyoke, Lawrence and Lynn.
All are illegal alien havens...
MA is run by Democrats.
“living with families in poverty”
I presume most of those “families” are single mothers with a bunch of kids by different fathers.
Milwaukee: Another liberal success story.
Uh-huh. So, um, what exactly are the parents doing to address these deficits? I can still remember sitting on my mother's lap at three years old and reciting the alphabet in the evenings (that would be followed up by my father reading to me and, later, my brother before bed.) This was circa the mid-to-late '70s.
LOL! Yeah. You can have my PBJ when you pry it from my cold, dead, sticky fingers.
Maybe some reasons they are poor is because soo much of the parents pay goes for property taxes in the socialist republic. I was watching cnn today and they had a story about the subprime mortgage mess and showed a lady in a house and she had on all this gold jewelry and had these manicured fingernails with jewels imbedded in her nails. She was saying how she needs help making her mortgage payment. I wish they would let me show them- get rid of the cable, cellphone, highspeed internet, drive an older used car, shop at Goodwill or thrift stores for anything, get a second job doing anything, eat Ramen noodles, go for walks instead of the gym, rent free movies,cd’s from your local library-its free. I want to hear some politician say that people who are in this mess should have volunteers come into a home and show people what to sell, what to cancel, and how to live on a budget, beofre asking the taxpayers to bail them out.
Creamy or chunky PB. It’s all good.
I know. My Dad moved us out of there in 1970, bless him!
Public Ed ping.
There was a really neat study done by Ruby Payne on Generational Poverty and how it relates to school. Google her name and read on what she has to say about it. Very interesting stuff.
Of course, our Founding Fathers had much less than these people do but yet I think they did rather well for themselves. My grandmother did not have indoor plumbing when my dad was born, but they did pretty well.
Big cities have schools with big city issues, and poverty is no different. But you are correct, they do hit on most of the issues that are plaguing the poor, but of course, none of them will actually do anything to help themselves.
I’m an adult about it, though. I don’t cut the crust off anymore.
It'd be my guess that this word is absent in the majority of these households
There’s something very satisfying, yet humbling, about PB&J’s. True “comfort food”.
I like them when they get a little smashed, and the jelly seeps into the top piece of bread.
While you have very good points, most of those do not apply to the poorest of the poor. If someone is sleeping on a pallet at night and doesn’t have a blanket for their children, I doubt that they are paying property taxes for anything. They are not renting free movies because there is no television or DVD/VHS player. For these families, and these are families headed by women, every day life is a nightmare and there is no mortgage payment to make, just a search for a safe place to sleep
Gabz, Amelia, and I have volunteered to take over the list so that Metmom can concentrate on home schooling issues.
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Was it one of you that had some information on the huge voucher/charter school movement in Milwaukee?
the kids need to rag on their parents to work harder and longer.
uh - what’s wrong with peanut butter?
When you are the 5th or 6th generation of your family to live on welfare, that’s all you’re going to know. Somehow, we need to make a job mandatory for a person to get welfare.
Mmmm.. peanut butter and dill pickle sammitch.
I’m serious!
Hillery! hasn't mentioned that.
Are you sure....
65% of the children in the entire County of Siskiyou CA live in poverty. Rural poverty doesn’t get near the attention of inner city poverty.
“You don’t get scholarships just because you’re poor or you’re black. You get them because you earn them.”
http://www.eldoradopromise.com/
1. Go to school
2. Graduate
3. Get a scholarship
What is El Dorado Promise?
El Dorado Promise is a unique scholarship program. The Promise provides graduates of El Dorado High School a tuition scholarship that can be used at any accredited Arkansas public university or community college, or any accredited private or out-of-state university.
Who is Eligible?
All students who graduate from El Dorado Public School, reside in the district, and have been an EPS student since at least the ninth grade. (Enrollment and residency must be continuous.)
Is El Dorado Promise Need-Based?
No.
What are the Terms of the Scholarship?
El Dorado Promise provides up to five years of tuition and mandatory fees for undergraduate post-secondary education for students entering college immediately following high school (unless interrupted by military service).
How is the El Dorado Promise Scholarship Funded?
Murphy Oil Corporation created the Promise to give El Dorado students an additional opportunity to pursue higher education. Murphy Oil Corporation will provide 100 percent of the Promise scholarship funds
And saying "NO!" to socialism would be a huge key element in Milwaukee, or any city. Socialism=Applied Boredom. Socialism=Poverty of Thought + Poverty of Inspiration + Poverty of Action=Poverty of Everything.
Socialism causes things fall apart, it's scientific.
Wouldn't surprise me if one out of three were obese, either.
I had some, and I’d have to dig it out. What I recall is that the original research showed gains for voucher students, but subsequent research showed significant flaws in the original methodology.
There were also problems with “private schools” that weren’t teaching anything but were getting rich off the voucher money, including maybe one run by a criminal or sex offender. Someone from that area might remember more.
I *think* some of the problems included that students who used the voucher program tended to perform better than those who didn’t to begin with.
So do I, and my kids, as well. However, I remember having PB&J sandwiches, hold the pb&j, and only one slice of bread. I grew up in poverty, too. And catsup sandwiches, hold the bread. Early pregnancy caused mine. Parents who are involved, as my mother was, even when working two and three jobs, however, can really help kids know there is a future out there. School is the path to that future.
Of course, in blue states, they seem to have a vested interest in keeping people in poverty.
getting more fathers involved in raising their children
Chicago—the city that keeps on giving.
The daddies are in Chicago...garnish their wages.
The people in this story are poor, inner city blacks. Very few own homes, have jobs or are married. They generally don’t pay any property taxes (and their slumlords don’t either, if the tax delinquency rates are to believed) or income taxes.
There is a culture in Milwaukee’s inner city that marks education as a bad thing. Working a job is “too white.”
Even the teachers I know despair of teaching most kids in the inner city. One retired teacher said that the only thing that has changed since she taught in the 1960s is that all the schools in Milwaukee suffer from the blight that was limited to a few inner city schools in 1960.
Most poverty in the US could be solved by learning to read, saving sex for marriage and showing up for work on time, 5 days a week.
Poverty in US = luxury in most of world.
That and what counts as poverty in the us gets more luxurious every year.
Electricity and running water need to be missing before I’ll consider it a big deal.
Is there a major city that is not rat operated? 500,000 population or more.
How about a roomate? Single parents who can’t afford to support their kids on their own salary need to network and share house and utility payments.
No one says you have the right to a 3 BR house all to yourself just because you have kids.
5 lb. bucket of Shed’s peanut butter in the house at all times.
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And what is the answer? Why, elect more Democrats, of course.
Something over 90% of the poor have TV sets. A majority have DVD players. Over 70% have a car.
Now, as you put it, "the poorest of the poor" would not have these things, by definition. But they are an exceedingly small sliver of society.
Nothing like the numbers that Milwaukee is reporting.
After what I've seen, personally, with my own eyes, I'd have to disagree with you on a couple points.
One, that if the kid is sleeping on a pallet without a blanket, it's the parents doing; and the other is that even if that's the case, they likely have those material things.
We lived in a welfare town and the kids would run around hungry, seriously under dressed, dirty, with no toys to speak of; while the parents had the TV, computer, booze, drugs, cigs, pets, takeout food, you name it. The problem wasn't lack of funds, but selfish immature behavior on the parents part.
There is tons of help available out there and these people would take it and take advantage of it. It just never made it to the kids.
It was so bad that all the charities and churches who did Christmas trees for the poor kids, would collect the names and get together and weed out all the duplicates. People would go around to all the different ones and leave their kids names so they'd get lots of free gifts from different sources.
And then there was Book-it by Pizza Hut to try to get kids to read. The kids would reach their goal for the month and get a certificate for a free personal pan pizza and the parents would take it and use it for themselves. The kids never saw the pizza.
I HATE welfare.
It would make sense as the ones taking advantage of the voucher program were already motivated to do better to start with. This would just give them an extra advantage and they had the sense and wherewithal to use it.
“Murphy Oil Corporation created the Promise to give El Dorado students an additional opportunity to pursue higher education. Murphy Oil Corporation will provide 100 percent of the Promise scholarship funds.”
We have a similar program in WI...though, of course, with the ‘Rats in charge, the Taxpayer foots the bill.
You only need a B average and have to “stay out of trouble” which is loosely defined. The two kids our ‘Rat Governor has never would’ve qualified for this. They both have criminal records as long as their arms. But, while they were growing up, their Daddy was the DA, so you can imagine there was never any “time served” for those two. Yeesh.
I can hardly wait for THIS boondoggle to start paying out. *Rolleyes*
“Wouldn’t surprise me if one out of three were obese, either.”
That was uncalled for. Why not call the kids b@stards while you’re at it? Yeesh.
They don’t need daddies. They need free government money!!
It pays to remember what TRUE Poverty once was. Thanks for your comments.
Yeah, don’t call a bastard kid a “bastard”. His momma might get so ashamed she can’t get pregnant again.
I agree.
And the incentives to make the decisions leading to multiple children by multiple men with no father in the house
were provided by liberals, through the government, with OUR money.
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