The Associated Press has a story about a study with an eye-popping statistic:
Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood.
. . .
For a family of four to be eligible, their annual take-home pay can’t exceed about $22,000.
Either we’re too generous with these sorts of benefits or (more likely, I suspect) there is a tremendous amount of economic instability for a lot of Americans. It’s not enough to get a job, work diligently, and expect that’s the end of the story. You have to have a Plan B and Plan C and do your best to build up a nest egg to weather the storm.
In the most recent installment of my series on Miller Elementary School ( http://jconline.com/miller ), I included a statistic that speaks to a similar trend.
At Miller this fall, 86.8 percent of students are eligible for free lunch, and an additional 6.3 percent are eligible for reduced-price lunch. (That’s a combined total of about 93% of the school.)
Across Lafayette School Corp., in grades K-5 (the elementary schools), 63.3 percent of children are eligible for free lunch and 8.2 percent for reduced-price lunch.
To qualify for the free lunch program, a family of four can earn no more than $28,665 per year. For a reduced-price lunch, a family of four can earn up to $40,793. Granted, that’s a higher income than food stamps, but it’s still a good swath of the Lafayette population subsiding on incomes most of us can’t fathom. It’s hard to imagine those numbers don’t affect the community in other ways.
It’s true… stats here in Indiana are horrifying. Plus, there are the multiplier effects of this – food insecurity leads to poor school performance, more health problems, etc. And ask any food pantry, community kitchen, or food bank – a vast majority of these families have at least one full-time wage earner.
It’s based on monthly rather than annual income. And “income” excludes many forms of government income assistance. Etc. etc.
A lot more detail is available at: http://www.fns.usda.gov/FSP/applicant_recipients/eligibility.htm
I had friends in grad school with kids who received food stamps. So, it can be a temporary thing– for better &/or worse– for people who will, soon, do quite well.
Key determinants: generally low earning power, unemployment (micro) or recession (macro), and single-parent households.
Is there an issue with the number of kids on free & reduced price lunches being inflated because other kinds of school funding is tied to the number of kids on free & reduced lunches? I’ve heard anecdotal suggestions of this but nothing all that solid.
the incentives are certainly there (for that as well as for other spending related to certain, supposed characteristics), but I don’t know of any data on that…
The money given is INSANE when you get over the 80% and 90% marks, at least for technology. I helped write the grant request a couple of times.
This is your USF fees at work. The tax you see at the bottom of your phone bill that says “Universal Service Fund”? This is where it goes now.
This fund was created so that if someone in Wyoming needed a phone and it cost the phone company $25,000 to run the line to his house, the phone companies could dip out of this fund.
Since we already have basic phone service for even the most remote areas, and the idea of cutting back isn’t in the government’s comprehension, we needed to find new places to spend the money. Schools were one of them, but it can only go to “telecommunications related” hardware. Since most phone systems are VoIP now, the entire data network is part of the phone system.
Now, I get why they first thought of the idea. If more kids are on free lunch at a given school, that school must need more help. However, a brand new $120,000 data center (that was just one of my grants) does not put food into a child’s mouth.
I had to run and present the facts real quick:
http://www.ed.gov/Technology/overview.html
Short version: If you have 75% or more of your kids on free or reduced lunch, you pay 10 cents on the dollar for your telecommunications needs. Hungry kids need more bandwidth.
In 2008, 1.8 (cue Dr. Evil) Billllllllllion dollars were at stake depending on the number of kids on free lunch. That’s *just* e-rate (USF), the only program I have direct experience with. I’m feeling pretty confident that it isn’t the only money tied to this figure.
Eric says “I had friends in grad school with kids who received food stamps. So, it can be a temporary thing– for better &/or worse– ”
That flies in the face of those that say people stay on public assistance, or at least food satmps, for long periods and from generation to generation.
Richmond schools have over 50% of students who are eligible for free or reduced lunches, which probably translates into eligibility for food stamps. I have no reason to believe that the numbers are being inflated, as they are nothing to brag about. Whatever benefits may be had from inflating the numbers, are outweighed by the negatives. I think that whatever people’s feelings and political affiliations, we need to come to grips with the fact that many people cannot meet basic needs for themselves or their children.