From The Executive Director
Two Reports Tell the Story Dr. Allene Magill
S
ometimes, charts and graphs tell a story more effectively than simple words. Two recent reports—one from the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) titled “A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South,” and the other from the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute (GBPI) titled “The Schoolhouse Squeeze”—contain charts that tell a devastating story of declining budgets in a time of increasing poverty among school children. They tell a stark story: As educators have been struggling with the effects of more than a decade in cuts to the education budget (approximately $8 billion), they have seen a significant increase in the number of children coming to school from low-income homes. Georgia is one of the poorest states in the nation, according to a recent report by the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, the K-12 education organization of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. The economic downturn of 2008 has exacerbated that poverty across our state. The SEF reports that a majority (57 percent) of our students are poor, and a significant percentage of them are in dire poverty. In our cities, the situation is even worse. Georgia is among the states where the child poverty rate in cities is 70 percent. Even in our suburbs, the poverty rate for children is 54 percent, as reported by the SEF. To show how widespread and deep this child poverty is, the SEF reports that in 71 percent of our school districts, a majority of students qualify for a free lunch, while in 84 percent of our school
May/June 2014
districts a majority of students meet the free or reduced price guideline. These children are in our schools every day, and educators must meet the challenge of educating them for a better life. We know that children of poverty can learn at high levels, but only if they have the kinds of supports and interventions that make a difference. But as the number of such children has increased, budget cuts have made those interventions and supports difficult if not impossible to provide. More children than ever are in danger of falling through the cracks in such a system. As the demand for more and costly interventions has increased, our schools have faced the most severe budget cuts in many, many years. In their report, GBPI notes that 80 percent of districts are furloughing teachers and 71 percent have cut their school year. Most tellingly, nearly 40 percent have cut programs that assist low-income students. Educating even our best students is a challenge in this environment, but to reach and teach those who come to school with severe poverty-related difficulties, it is challenging in the extreme. PAGE has been encouraging school systems to tell the stories of the challenges they are facing and engage their entire communities in community conversations. The goal is to share the realities of the situation and reach agreements about the role that individuals and groups can play in those communities in working toward solutions. To help advance and
spread these discussions across the state and to provide educators with a common set of facts and data, PAGE is bringing together teams of educators in June for a meeting on “Georgia Students: The Faces of Poverty.” Participants will hear presentations from Steve Suitts, executive director of the Southern Education Foundation, and Claire Suggs, senior education policy analyst for the Georgia Public Budget Institute. To assist participants in the process of developing and shaping their stories for their communities, we will have Ellen Angelotti of the Poynter Institute for Media address the group. Breakout sessions will round out the day as groups from around the state who have already begun or are planning their community conversations share with their colleagues what they have learned. We will report on this meeting, its results and further action as community conversations unfold in the coming year. Our state’s demographics and history of poverty are not things we can change, nor can we attack the national and global forces playing out in our economy, but these factors do not need to become our destiny. We do not have to accept the status quo. We can and we must address the needs of all our students, including those of poverty. At PAGE, we believe we can engage our communities in ways that enable them to fully understand the dimensions of the problem and engage them to join with educators in working n toward solutions.
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