September 11, A Personal Poem

To my friends at Poverty Reduction Initiative:

There will be a short hiatus of my postings to this blog. My apologies for that. My daughter passed away on Labor Day. It was a week shy of her 25th birthday on 9/11.

With that in mind, please allow me to share a poem that I wrote for her on her birthday in 2008:

September 11

Some days are sacred
and filled with memories
for Christians it is
Christmas or Easter,
I suppose.
But for me the day I first held you child
is most blessed.

A father's bond started
on this day, your whole life ago,
only for me not so long.
It seems an instant
since the precious time
I first stroked your hair
and the tears rolled down my cheeks
as you entered my heart
right there, right then.

Mothers carry within their wombs
and love for months before dads.
The kicks of little hands and legs
and beats of tiny hearts are foreign to us
something to feel from the outside
not within.
So it is on day one
that our devotion begins.

Such it is.
A father's love
starts then, my precious daughter,
and for this dad
it never dies
as my heart was yours
that very day
and will always be
for this there is no end.

- Rob B.

God's Kitchen Opening Delayed in Battle Creek

God's Kitchen-Battle Creek, a new soup kitchen that was scheduled to open Labor Day, now will not open until Oct. 3, according to a press release Friday evening from the nonprofit's board of directors.

Pastor William Stein, chairman of the soup kitchen's board of directors, cited an "unsuccessful fundraising campaign" for the delay.

The kitchen was supposed to open inside the Springfield Farmers Market in Begg Park and serve meals from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday to low-income children, seniors and families. It also hopes to promote health and fitness through various health screenings and activities at the park. Stein had hoped to raise $10,000 by Monday's opening.

"We may have moved too quickly," Stein said in the release. "Our soup kitchen must be operational by Oct. 3 in order to provide assistance to the hundreds of individuals and families that are about to be kicked off of welfare."

www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20110903/NEWS01/109030305/God-s-Kitchen-opening-delayed

Black Unemployment Highest Since 1984

The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market.

Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department reported.

"This month's numbers continue to bear out that longstanding pattern that minorities have a much more challenging time getting jobs," said Bill Rodgers, chief economist with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

Black unemployment has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.

Economists blame a variety of factors. The black workforce is younger than the white workforce, lower numbers of blacks get a college degree and many live in areas of the country that were harder hit by the recession -- all things that could lead to a higher unemployment rate.

But even excluding those factors, blacks still are hit with higher joblessness.

money.cnn.com/2011/09/02/news/economy/black_unemployment_rate/index.htm?iid=HP_Highlight

Who’s lovin’ it? The life of McDonald’s workers

McDonald's is, af­ter Wal-Mart, the nation's sec­ond-largest private employer, with 700,000 workers. And as the econ­o­my flags, and as more Americans seek cheap­er food, that number is ris­ing.

On April 19, McDonald's held a National Hiring Day and says that it brought in 62,000 new employees.

"We've got flexible sched­ules, ben­efits and jobs that can turn into satisfying ca­reers," McDonald's' Web site said. Yet many people above the poverty line would nev­er even consid­er working at McDonald's. The stigma of working at McDonald's is so cultur­ally ingrained that since 2001 the Oxford En­glish Dictio­nary has de­fined the neol­o­gism "McJob" as "an unstim­u­lating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. cre­ated by the expan­sion of the ser­vice sector."

La­bor advocates are pre­dictably in lockstep with the OED. "McDonald's is no worse than Burg­er King or Wendy's or anyone else in the fast-food indus­try," says Jose Oliva, national pol­icy co­or­dinator for Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which advocates for food ser­vice workers nationwide. "But it pays the low­est wages pos­sible. It starts people at minimum wage and then keeps them at a low wage for as long as they can get away with it." (Minimum wage is $8.25 in the (Washington D.C.) and $7.55 nationwide. Accord­ing to the Bu­reau of La­bor Statis­tics, 4.36 million American workers are paid minimum wage or less.) ...

www.ongo.com/v/1740466/10586/A6C6AAAAB8201A2F/whos-lovin-it-the-life-of-mcdonalds-workers

114 Calhoun County Families Will Lose Cash Assistance Benefits in a Month

With more than 100 local low-income families preparing to lose state cash assistance in the next month, Calhoun County nonprofits are skeptical of their ability to fill the need.

State lawmakers approved new four-year limits on Michigan's cash assistance program last week. The changes mean 114 cases in Calhoun County and 11,162 around Michigan will lose welfare benefits starting Oct. 1, according to the Michigan Department of Human Services.

"It's just going to add more pressure to our system, that's for sure, and things are already challenging," said Bob Randels, executive director of the Food Bank of South Central Michigan.

So far this year, the food bank's distributions are already up 22 percent from a record-breaking 2010, Randels said.

Nancy MacFarlane, CEO of Community Action, which helps low-income families in Calhoun and three other counties, said the organization simply won't be able to take on the extra need.

"We help people until we run out of money," she said.

www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20110831/NEWS01/108310306/114-Calhoun-County-families-lose-cash-assistance

Son's Drug Bust May Make Mom Homeless

Sandy Douglas said she has no idea where she will be living after this week. Douglas, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, and her 11-year old daughter won't be able to afford the apartment they've lived in for several years. They've lost their government housing subsidy, commonly called a Section 8 grant after the part of the law that created it.

They lost it because of what Douglas' 20-year-old son did.

He was convicted of cocaine posession. Because he was on the lease for her apartment, the Grand Rapids Housing Commission - which administered her rent subsidy - revoked it because her son was busted for drugs.

"I kept saying, 'I'm not responsible for my son. He's 20,'" Douglas told Target 8 investigators.

But the Housing Commission takes a hard line on drug offenses. "Anybody on the lease, if caught, would automatically be terminated," Director Carlos Sanchez said. "We are mandated by the federal government not to serve people involved in drug-related activity."

Son's drug bust may make mom homeless: woodtv.com

Center on Budget & Policy Priorities Report: TANF and How Well Does It Provide Income Support for Poor Families?

President Clinton signed the 1996 welfare law 15 years ago today, creating the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant to replace the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. We’ll present a series of posts this week that provide a closer look at how welfare reform has played out over the last 15 years. Today’s post focuses on TANF as a source of income support for poor families.

TANF’s early years witnessed unprecedented declines in the number of families receiving cash assistance — and unprecedented increases in the share of single mothers working, especially those with less than a high school education. But since then, nearly all of the employment gains have disappeared, and TANF caseloads have responded only modestly to increased need during this deep and long downturn.

As the following charts make clear, TANF remains an important source of income support for a small, but vulnerable group of families. However, because relatively few families receive TANF and benefits are very low, TANF plays a much more limited role in helping families escape poverty or deep poverty (i.e., income below half the poverty line) today than AFDC did.

www.offthechartsblog.org/tanf-at-15-part-i-how-well-does-it-provide-income-support-for-poor-families/

Economic Slow Growth Leads to Rapid Growth in SNAP

This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is expected to release its latest update on the food stamp program. It's an important indicator of the nation's economic health — and the prognosis is not good.

Food stamp use is up 70 percent over the past four years and that trend is expected to continue.

The spike began in late-2008 and early-2009 when the worst of the recession was triggering massive layoffs and home foreclosures. Although the economy has been growing since mid-2009, the pace has been too slow to absorb the nearly 14 million people without jobs. Nearly half of those have been out of work more than six months.

As a result, the number of people seeking federal help with groceries has been soaring. At this time four years ago, before the recession hit, about 27 million people were using food stamps. Today 46 million get help through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — what most people call food stamps — which is roughly 15 percent of the population.

www.npr.org/2011/08/28/139968385/slow-growth-economy-spikes-food-stamp-reliance

A Tale of Two Schools: A Cautionary Tale on School Rankings

The following opinion is my own and not the opinion of anyone else affiliated with One Southwest Michigan, One Community:

The Michigan Department of Education recently released rankings of all schools in the State of Michigan, nearly 3,800 of them. School rankings sometimes reduce complex educational problems into overly simplified tables. Local newspapers have described the methodology behind the rankings as: "approved by the US Department of Education," not a very thorough explanation.

Similarly, Consumer Reports (CR) reviews and ranks the best and worst automobiles in the country. In order to prepare these rankings, CR performs their own thorough tests of vehicles as well as surveys thousands of vehicle owners throughout the country.

One way to think of the CR rankings is that they take a look at what auto companies do with the raw materials they are provided (i.e., steel, plastic, and rubber) and try to assess the quality of the finished product. The results can be surprising: The lowly and moderately priced Chevrolet Malibu is a much more highly rated vehicle than the over priced Cadillac Escalade, and for that matter higher rated than all other Cadillac models. Personally, I would rather drive a Chevy Malibu than a Cadillac, but I wonder if most Americans would feel the same way.

I would guess that most of the journalists doing the reporting on the recent release of the Michigan Department of Education rankings, and for that matter the readers of the articles, have no idea what criteria or methodology were used to rank the schools as the “best” or the “worst”.

Let me give you an example. Let's call it "A Tale of Two Schools."

East Grand Rapids, aka, Cadillac Escalade, and Hartford High School, aka, Chevrolet Malibu. East GR is one of the wealthiest communities in West Michigan. Lots of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals call East GR their home. There are lots of million dollar homes in East GR. Not so many in Hartford. Here is some data on the two schools:

% of Children Who are Poor (i.e., qualify for lunch program)

East G.R. = 9%
Hartford = 70%

% of Schools Which the School Outperforms

East G.R. = 62%
Hartford = 47%

+ Increase or - Decline in Performance from the District's Middle School

East G.R. = -33%
Hartford = +25%

East GR's middle school is in the top 5% of the state in academic performance. On top of that, all of East GR's elementary schools are in the top 10%, one of them Wealthy Elementary, is in the top 1%. 95% of the schools in the State have more poor children than East GR. So basically, East GR High School takes kids from lower grades who are in the top 10% of achievement in the state, living in one of the wealthiest suburban communities in the state (as measured by free/reduced lunch counts), with some of the best school facilities in the state on the banks of Reeds Lake where they win lots of state athletic championships, and turns them into average achievers at their high school so that their parents with all of their political connections can then spend lots of money to send them to the nation's Ivy league and other premier colleges.

Why is East GR High School not on the list of poorly performing schools? The “raw materials” they receive from lower grades tell me that they should be performing much better than they are.

On the other hand, Hartford High School in rural Michigan and one of the poorer communities in the state, takes kids from lower grades, who admittedly should be doing better, and turns them into students who achieve nearly as well as East Grand Rapids students: average for the state. And since Hartford parents don't have the resources and political connections of their Kent County counterparts, my guess is that Hartford kids go on to achieve excellence at schools that are not for U.S. News and World Reports Ivy League elite, i.e., schools like Western, Grand Valley, and Michigan State. And I would bet that right now Hartford teachers and administrators are working diligently to improve the educational opportunity for all kids, not just a rich elite few.

The moral of the story is that a good Chevy is always better than a crummy, over priced Cadillac.

My kudos to Hartford High School for achieving nearly as well as East GR with far fewer resources. Hartford High School far outperforms its peers in improving educational achievement for its students. You make all of us Chevy owners proud!

Finally, I wish journalists would dig a little deeper into a story about educational achievement to understand and explain how the rankings come about. The simple statement that it is a system of ranking “approved by the US Department of Education” is not a very thorough explanation.

Big Brothers Big Sisters Training Tuesday in St. Joseph

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Berrien and Cass has scheduled an In-Service Training Meeting for its Big Brothers and Big Sisters, both community-based and site-based, on Tuesday from 5 to 7 p.m. at Lakeland Regional Medical Center’s Community Meeting Room at 1234 Napier Ave. in St. Joseph.

The staff will present the Child Safety and Youth Protection Guidelines and Ground Rules, guidelines which will help the mentor volunteers develop a healthy relationship with their Littles and will help them teach the children in their care about appropriate boundaries as well as how to build skills which will protect them from violence while allowing them to recognize and trust the caring adults in their lives.

BBBS also welcomes prospective volunteers to this training, as long as they preregister by calling 684-1100 ext. 3 or e-mailing info@bbbsofbc.org.

Big Brothers Big Sisters is a United Way-funded program.

To learn more about mentoring opportunities available for volunteers at BBBS, go to

www.bbbsofbc.org

The above article originally appeared in the Niles Daily Star at:

www.nilesstar.com/2011/08/25/big-brothers-big-sisters-training-tuesday-in-st-joseph/