Poverty in your back yard

The girl and her brothers weren’t just hungry. They were scared, in need of reassurance along with something to eat. The lunchroom worker knew they’d recently been abandoned by their parents.

“I remember them just clinging to me in the lunchroom,” says Pat Marble, who spent 33 years feeding kids in the Washoe County School District. “They were frightened. Their whole lives had been uprooted.”

Years later, when Marble was working as assistant director for the district’s nutrition services department, she was conducting a training session for lunchroom workers. A young woman sat in the back of the room. She didn’t leave when the training was over.

“She said she was there to thank me for what I’d done for her and her brothers,” Marble says. “She thanked me for helping them through a difficult time and getting them something to eat when they had nothing at home.”

This is just one of Marble’s stories. And Marble, now a special-projects manager for the Food Bank of Northern Nevada, is just one of many workers feeding hungry kids in Washoe County, where one in three public school students qualify for subsidized school meals. As Reno grows, so does the population of working poor families in need of assistance.

“It’s out there, but sometimes we put our blinders on and think that [poverty] only is a problem in other communities, in other countries,” Marble says. “It really is in our back yard. You always have those kids who come to school in winter with no shoes, or shoes with no socks or no jackets. This happens all the time.”

The U.S. Census Bureau in mid-September reported that childhood poverty was on the rise across the nation for the second year in a row. Not surprisingly, the increase extends to Nevada, according to info at the U.S. Census Web site.

Marble recently retired from the school district. She began working for the Food Bank in September. She can see the number of needy kids rising in Washoe County and even more in Clark County, where the number of approved applications for the Clark County School District’s free-lunch program soared from 75,000 last year to 90,000 this year.

“In our state, casinos employ a great many people,” Marble says. “And they employ them at a living salary but not much more than that.”

About 102,000 households in Nevada have an annual income of less than $15,000. If a family pays about $1,000 per month for rent, that doesn’t leave much to pay utility bills, medical expenses and transportation costs, Marble says, let alone buy food.

In 2002, more than 12.1 million kids nationally were living below the federally defined poverty standard— making less than $14,072 for a three-person family. That’s an increase of 400,000 children since 2001, according to the recent U.S. Census Bureau report.

“For children, poverty is a particular and growing problem,” says Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher for the Washington, D.C.-based Children’s Defense Fund who was interviewed by phone. “Not just because poverty is growing, but because poverty is growing so important.”

Poor kids are twice as likely to repeat a grade or drop out of school. Drop-outs are less likely to find jobs with livable wages. The cycle perpetuates itself.

An MIT statistician working for the Children’s Defense Fund calculated that every year a child spends in poverty ends up costing that individual about $11,800 in future income. The CDF, Sherman says, thinks it’s crucial to ensure all families have the opportunity to work their way out of poverty.

“We can make sure there’s an adequate minimum wage,” she says. “We can make sure tax policies like the Children’s Tax Credit that the president championed are available to all families regardless of how poor they are.”

This year, Sherman says, a surge in unemployment has left record numbers of parents without a job for longer than six months.

“The [jobless] numbers have tripled in the past couple of years,” she says. “We need to extend long-term unemployment benefits.”

Nevadans are giving types, Marble says. Area residents who hear about the needy of their community tend to be willing to come forward and support with money and time such enterprises as the Food Bank.

“When we go out and talk to the community or hold a fundraiser, people come and give freely,” Marble says. “And obviously money helps, but I don’t think that’s the secret. Everybody needs to be aware of the problem. We need to teach people how to take care of themselves.”

Marble’s plans for Food Bank’s future projects include working on getting more breakfast in the classroom programs going at more public schools in southern and northern Nevada. This work, part of the Child Nutrition Initiative, recently received a two-year grant from the state’s Fund for a Healthy Nevada, tobacco company settlement money. She also would like to see a community garden, where people can grow produce to supplement their food supplies. She’d like to see programs to teach families how to use food pantry goods more efficiently.

“We have a duty to give families some of those helping hands,” Marble says. “It’s not going to solve the problem because the problem is large.”

The work force is changing, she notes. Most workers need to have some kind of training. Unskilled workers can’t break out of the poverty cycle without job training or higher education—things that they may not have an opportunity to get.

“I think our industries have to step up to the plate and help people,” Marble says.

To Sherman, the Bush administration’s trickle-down economic philosophies aren’t doing much to raise the standard of living for the nation’s poor.

"[The Bush administration] and its economist friends seem to be the only people who think [a tax cut for the wealthy] is a good use of the money if you want to create jobs,” Sherman says.

Neither the more-than-trillion-dollar tax cut of two years ago or the tax cut passed earlier this year—"that distributed $93,000 to the average millionaire,” Sherman says—was well-targeted to increase consumer spending at “mom-and-pop stores around the country.”

“We have these short-term massive tax cuts with promises of long-term results, and yet poverty keeps mounting,” Sherman says.

Those sickened by thinking of young children in need can do two things, she suggests. First, support local groups that are addressing needs in northern Nevada, from food pantries to the Interfaith Hospitality Network. Second, don’t forget about the policymakers who have real power for change.

“Let your representatives know that there are better things to do with $350 billion than targeted tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans," Sherman says. "That’s something the wealthy would often agree with. Just possibly, a higher priority would be ensuring that a low-income family gets a good quality Head Start preschool program for their child and has a chance for job training. Those things are more likely to help the nation in the long run."