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Handicapped by poverty

We could hope that newspaper editorial staff across the country would echo this editorial.

Editorial

Kentucky must invest in future of schoolchildren whose low-income families can't

Another school year has started with the usual exhortations about investing in our future.

But in Kentucky, that high-flying rhetoric can sound flat because we know that so many of our children go into the classroom handicapped by poverty.

Last week, the Carsey Institute released a study on child poverty in rural America, showing that 27.7 percent of Kentucky's rural children live in homes with incomes below the federal poverty line of $20,650 for a family of four.

In Fayette County, secure within the state's so-called Golden Triangle, almost 42 percent of the children in our public schools are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

Free lunches are available to children in homes with incomes at less than 130 percent of the federal poverty level, about $26,845 for that family of four; reduced prices are available to kids from homes with incomes of up to $38,202.

Demographers say economic status is the single best indicator of a child's well-being. Poverty makes kids more likely to be sick, emotionally stressed and delinquent.

There was one hopeful statistic released last week: Poor children in Kentucky are much more likely to have health insurance than poor kids in the rest of the nation.

Nationally, 19.7 percent of children living in poverty were uninsured; only 9.7 percent of Kentucky's poor children don't have health insurance.

While the percent is relatively small, it still represents more than 50,000 children.

Some people will argue that statistics can be deceptive, even debilitating. They will say poverty isn't an irrevocable sentence to perpetual second-class citizenship and that it's condescending at best to suggest it is. They will say it's not government's job to solve all these problems.

All of those arguments are sometimes true.

But any parent who has worried and struggled to give a child the opportunity to succeed knows it isn't right or fair to condemn so many of our children to starting each school year with so many strikes against them.

These statistics are a reminder that this gubernatorial election year, we must demand thoughtful, long-term approaches to investing in our future by attacking Kentucky's endemic poverty.

— Editorial
Herald-Leader
2007-09-02


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