The School of Hard Knocks

Poverty is corrosive to school kids. Many of them suffer in silence while their families either spiral into homelessness or frantically struggle to maintain the façade that all is well.

Thanks to the recession, this problem is bad and getting worse. UCLA published a report last month on the recession’s impact in California schools [2]. Researchers interviewed 87 middle and high school principals across the state. The news was not good.

Sixty-seven percent of the principals reported that kids in their schools faced greater housing insecurity. That includes homelessness, families moving in together and families moving away for economic reasons. Fifty-one percent of those surveyed reported a jump in the health, psychological or social needs of their students.

Meanwhile, across the country in South Carolina, the Education Department reported [3] that the number of homeless students enrolled in public schools jumped to 8,750 in 2009 from 6,000 in 2007. That’s an average of about 32 new homeless kids for each of the state’s 85 school districts.

And these numbers don’t tell the full story. Many districts quietly helped parents find shelter and basic necessities like food and clothing.

“That’s all over the country – that’s every school district,” one South Carolina official told The Greenville News. “Any state coordinator you talk to is going to tell you there’s a lot more students out there than these numbers show.”

The U.S. economy began growing again in the second half of 2009, after two years of recession. But unemployment has remained stubbornly high at 10 percent. A recent report by Feeding America [4] shows that hunger is disproportionately hurting blacks and Latinos. Both groups make up about 15 percent of the population. Yet black Americans account for 34 percent of the people desperate for food and Latinos account for 21 percent.

The recession is just part of the problem. Long-term demographic shifts are altering the education landscape. The Southern Education Foundation reported [5] last month that the South has become the first region of the country where more than half the public school students are poor and more than half are African American, Latino, Asian or Native American. That change is not caused by white flight, but by an influx of Latinos and other ethnic groups.

For a teacher, this news translates into a series of quiet struggles. It can mean forgiving a student who–because his home is now a pressure-cooker—has begun acting out. It can mean sticking up for the girl who has become distracted and inattentive in class. It can mean getting a kid home each day because his parents can’t.

Do you see signs of this deepening poverty at your school? If so, what has the community done to help people cope?