Census: Janesville's poverty rate has doubled in seven years

from the Janesville Gazette

By Stacy Vogel

svogel@gazetteextra.com

Janesville

Stacy Bembinster doesn't think of poverty in terms of charts and statistics.

She sees it in the faces of the students she works with every day as counselor at Kennedy Elementary School.

There's the girl whose mother works two jobs and can't pick her up from day care until 10 or 11 at night.

There are the children whose parents sink into drug and alcohol problems when they can't see a way out of their financial troubles.

The children who sit for 45 minutes after school because no one's available to pick them up.

The ones who don't even make it to school because the car broke down or Mom or Dad have a job interview and can't get them ready.

So Bembinster's not surprised when she hears the numbers.

"Some of these families, they're really trying, and they're working two or three jobs and they're still not making it," she said.

There's no question poverty is on the rise in Janesville.

Numbers released from the U.S. Census Bureau last week show poverty has almost doubled in the city in the last seven years, from 6.5 percent in 1999 to 12.7 percent in 2006.

That means one in eight Janesville residents now lives below the federal poverty line.

The bureau tracks poverty numbers every 10 years as part of the nationwide census, but it also creates yearly profiles for cities with populations above 65,000. Janesville broke through the threshold last year, allowing a glimpse at an alarming trend taking hold of the city in the first decade of the new millennium.

The increase is reflected in an increasing demand for assistance at community agencies such as ECHO and Community Action, officials there say.

The number of people receiving food assistance from ECHO, or Everyone Cooperating to Help Others, has jumped from 15,000 in 2001 to almost 22,000 in 2006, executive director Karen Lisser said.

But that doesn't tell the whole story because there often are more people requesting services than money available to help them, she said.

"The need is up, but there's some years where we didn't have (money)," she said.

It's hard to know where the impoverished people are coming from, said James Winship, a social work professor at UW-Whitewater and one of the founding members of the Rock County Homeless Task Force. (Winship is no longer active on the task force).

He suspects many of the people now defined as impoverished are residents who were hovering just above the poverty line before, as opposed to people who moved to Janesville after they already were in poverty.

"I would think that at least a part of it is people who are right under that poverty level, working poor," he said.

Wages for low-skilled workers haven't risen as fast as the cost of living, driving many employed people into poverty, he said.

It's a problem Lisa Furseth, executive director of Community Action of Rock and Walworth Counties, said she encounters every day.

"One of the biggest challenges (the poor) have is finding jobs, full-time jobs and jobs that pay living wage," she said. "Wages are just not keeping up with inflation at many, many positions in our communities."

People with little education or job skills often end up taking part-time, seasonal or temporary jobs that don't offer critical benefits such as health insurance, she said. They end up stuck in poverty because they can't afford the education necessary to pull themselves out, she said.

In response, Community Action operates the Skills Enhancement Program to help people access training and education, Furseth said. The program helps clients with everything from finding child care so parents can go to classes to helping pay for books.

The program helps clients earn an average of $12,000 more a year but only serves about 45 people annually. Meanwhile, increasing demand for every service Community Action offers has forced the organization to make some tough choices, Furseth said.

The organization recently ended a program for at-risk Beloit middle schoolers so it could expand its teen parenting program. Prevention programs are often the first to go when resources get tight, Furseth said.

"It's harder and harder to devote resources to working upstream when you have high demand for crisis programs," she said.

At Kennedy Elementary School, the increasing number of students showing up without even food in their stomachs caused administrators to institute a breakfast program in March, Principal Niel Bender said.

"We've had some kids come to school saying they're hungry, that they didn't get breakfast," he said. "If students haven't had a good nutritious meal before coming to school, that's certainly going to affect their attention level."

The school has seen its number of low-income children-defined as children eligible for free or reduced lunch-more than triple since it opened in 1998. About 34 percent of its student body qualified in the last school year, Bender said.

"You hear about those things. Come time for holidays, there's fewer gifts, we know that," he said. "People are asking for warm clothes, coats, things like that. A lot of the kids might come without boots, snow pants."

The school helps where it can, giving school supplies to children whose parents can't afford to buy them and offering counseling services when problems at home show up in the children's behavior and schoolwork, Bender said.

But he knows the school is addressing the symptoms of poverty, not the cause.

Is there a solution out there?

"Boy I don't have an answer to that one," he said. "I wish there were."