ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 12, 1996 TAG: 9612120012
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
THE NATIONAL SURVEY also shows that the number of kids younger than 6 living in poverty doubled from 3.5 million to 6.1 million between 1975 and 1994.
About 17 percent of the children in Virginia who are younger than 6 live in poverty, according to a national study.
But Virginia is one of 18 states whose "young child" poverty rate ranks below the national rate of 25 percent, the study found.
The study, released Wednesday by the National Center for Children in Poverty, found that 25 percent - or 6.1 million - of the children in the United States under the age of 6 live in poverty. Nearly 100,000 of the 6.1 million are in Virginia.
The center's study - "One in Four: America's Youngest Poor" - examined poverty rates from 1975 to 1994 for children younger than 6 for all 50 states. The study relied on data from the U.S. Census Bureau but did not include 1995 because data for that year was not available when the study began seven months ago, said Julian Palmer, center spokesman.
The study focused on children in the under-6 age group because "they are most vulnerable to the effects of poverty - hunger, lack of access to quality health care, violence and many other risk factors connected to poverty," Palmer said. "They have the highest poverty rates, compared to other age groups in the population."
The study found that from 1975 to 1994, the number of children younger than 6 who lived in poverty rose from 3.5 million to 6.1 million. And the majority of those 6.1 million children lived in families where one or both parents worked.
"It's just spiraling downhill," said Virginia Hardin, director of the Roanoke Valley Alliance for Children. "The legislation end of it is getting more stringent, screening out more needy families and kids. The whole climate is so much more mean-spirited toward poor people, kind of blaming them. [There is] less of a feeling of compassion and ownership that we're all kind of in this together."
Efforts to overhaul welfare - in Virginia and nationwide - have cast a negative light on people who need public assistance, Hardin said. The public now tends to view welfare recipients as having done something wrong for needing public assistance, she said.
And "folks who have worked in the [social services] system for a long time have felt pretty paranoid speaking out in favor of children and families," Hardin said. "Everything is politicized rather than just a human issue of some people don't have enough."
One reason the National Center for Children in Poverty conducted the study was to give states a data tool to use as they phase in a new welfare system, Palmer said.
"We thought that at a time when state governments are being given more responsibility for programs that affect poor kids, that there should be a solid baseline of information on how serious problems of child poverty are in Virginia and other states," he said.
"We are asking that as welfare reform is implemented, that every state in the nation track the child poverty rate and use that to help evaluate the success of new programs," Palmer said.
The study found that nationally the rate of poverty for poor children under 6 living in suburban areas grew by nearly 60 percent between the late 1970s and early 1990s. The rates of poverty for children under 6 living in urban and rural areas rose by 34 and 45 percent, respectively.
The study also found that the rate of poverty for children in that age group grew twice as fast among whites as among blacks - 38 percent compared to 19 percent - between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.
White children were the largest ethnic group of children under 6 in poverty, the study found. In 1994, more than 2.2 million white children under 6 were living in poverty compared to 1.9 million black children and 1.7 million Hispanic children.
Other findings:
*A full-time job has become less likely to keep a family with young children out of poverty.
*In 1994, 4.8 million children under 6 lived in "near poverty." Near poverty that year was between $15,141 and $28,011 for a family of four.
*The percentage of children under 6 living in extreme poverty increased from 6 percent to 12 percent between 1975 and 1994 - growing faster than the percentage of children under 6 who are either poor or nearly poor. Extreme poverty, in 1994, was $7,571 for a family of four.
*Nearly half of all children under 6 - 45 percent - lived in poor or nearly poor families in 1994.
*The poverty rate for young children was more than double the rate for adults or the elderly in 1994. Over the last three decades the poverty rate for elderly Americans has been reduced by two-thirds, while it rose for children under six by more than 40 percent during the same period.
*The poverty rate for young children is significantly higher than the poverty rates for children ages 6 to 17.
"I don't think we've made a very good assault on child poverty," said Ted Edlich, president of Total Action Against Poverty, a Roanoke community action agency. "We never really targeted poor families and poor young families."
The TAP Head Start program serves only one-quarter of the eligible Head Start population in Roanoke because of lack of funding - "30 years after the war on poverty," Edlich said. Head Start is a federal enrichment program for preschool children from low-income families.
"We're still not grown up enough to really see children in poverty as a real resource of the country. It's very sad, and the kinds of initiatives that have been taken have been wholly inadequate to reverse that trend.
"Those kids at the upper end will have all sorts of advantages. Those at the bottom will have hardly any."
The National Center for Children in Poverty, established in 1989 at the School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York, aims to identify and promote strategies that will reduce the number of young children living in poverty in the U.S.
LENGTH: Long : 106 linesby CNB