More poverty, even more poor children

from The Hutchinson News


Census shows poverty rising in Kansas alongside income, and growing at an even higher rate for residents under 18
By Dave Stephens - The Hutchinson News - dstephens@hutchnews.com

The number of Kansans living in poverty grew during the first five years of this century, even as the state's median income increased by more than 4 percent.

According to recently released data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of people in Kansas living below the federal poverty level increased from less than 9 percent to almost 12 percent between 2000 and 2005.

In most Kansas counties, the poverty rate increased at an even higher rate for children under the age of 18. Statewide, about 15.5 percent of children live at below the federal poverty level, but in parts of central and southwest Kansas the rates were even higher.

In Reno County, 18.2 percent of children live in poverty; in Barton, Stafford, Seward and Finney counties, more than one in five children do.

Those figures come as no surprise to Tawny Stottlemire, executive director of the Kansas Association of Community Action Programs, which oversees a statewide network of organizations fighting poverty.

"Since they've begun tracking poverty statistics, Kansas has usually kept pace with the national level or even been below it," Stottlemire said. "Now, we're seeing the long-term trend starting to go above the national level, that our poverty rate is actually increasing at a greater rate."

The rise of poverty in central Kansas for the five years between 2000 and 2005 came even as some counties saw median incomes grow by 7 percent or 8 percent - double the state average.

In Reno County, the median income grew by 8 percent from 2000 to 2005, but the percentage of children living below the poverty level grew by 4.1 percent. In Barton County, which includes the towns of Great Bend, Ellinwood and Hoisington, the median income grew by 7 percent, but childhood poverty grew by 6.2 percent - the highest rate in the region.

Stottlemire said Kansas and the nation have seen a growing disparity between the wages earned by the highest- and lowest-paid workers. While incomes for many are rising, some workers are laboring at jobs with wages that haven't seen significant increases in more than a decade.

"As the gap continues to increase, we see lots of workers suffering," Stottlemire said.

But income doesn't necessarily tell the whole story about the causes of poverty, Census data shows. In some western Kansas counties, median income actually declined over the five-year period as the poverty level stayed stagnant.

In Lane and Kearny counties, the median income dropped by more than 5 percent, and the poverty levels in both counties grew by less than 2 percent.

Figures like that belie the difficulty of solving the state's poverty problem, Stottlemire said, because the causes include a complex mix of income, housing, health care, education and other factors.

Although the latest Census figures highlight the growing poverty problem in Kansas, they only touch on the people in the lowest income bracket - $20,650 for a household of four or $13,690 for a family of two.

Stottlemire said the 2007 estimate is that 12 percent to 13 percent of the state lives below the federal poverty level; an additional 15 percent of the population is believed to be in the struggling category, unable to make ends meet on a regular basis and often one missed paycheck or health crisis away from poverty.

"That's nearly 25 percent of the state's population together that's barely getting by," Stottlemire said. "And it's a number that continues to grow."