Student poverty numbers not exactly what they seem

School-age children with families totaled 339 last year out of Koochiching County’s population of 13,213. Children living in poverty has been shown to directly link to problems later in life such as a lack of education, earning power and drug and alcohol abuse.

“These estimates are sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and are used as one of the criteria to allocate federal funds to local education agencies,” Acting Census Bureau Director Thomas Mesenbourg said in a statement. “In addition, state and local programs use these estimates for distributing funds and managing school programs.”

But the bureau’s numbers, while developed from several national sources including tax filings, may not tell the whole story in this version of small town and rural America, local human services experts said. Despite best efforts, the less fortunate here may not appear on government charts because of pride, inexperience and isolation.

“Children from these households show higher poverty rates,” wrote Jim Woehrle, interim executive director of KOOTASCA Community Action, in a three-year report he issued last month. “Child poverty here is three to six percentage points higher than the state average.”

The nonprofit social services agency assists Koochiching and Itasca county residents to end poverty through programs including fuel, housing, education and health care. And it focuses on children’s well-being.

One obstacle is that parents often are too embarrassed to ask for help from folks they may have gone to school with or lived near.

Many might qualify for public assistance programs also can be difficult to locate or have “doubled up” or moved back with their parents to make ends meet and pitch in to care for the kids while working two or three jobs, said Amy Mortenson, the nonprofit’s International Falls support specialist. A lot of these people also don’t consider themselves poor, she said.

“It’s not uncommon now to see three generations under one roof, or there’s a lot of couch hopping going on. It’s hard to pinpoint problems,” she said.

The statewide poverty rate for children ages 5 to 17 who live with their families is 13.6 percent or about 113,000 Minnesotans. The county numbers, though, are well below the national rate of almost 21 percent, which equates to about 11 million kids. The federal government’s poverty line is $23,500 for a four-person household.

“Poverty rates generally have been the same,” Woehrle said. “It’s pretty much a flat economy, and it’s become a challenge just to make ends meet.”

The program also shows that Koochiching County’s median household income only increased from $41,964 to $42,771 from 2007 to 2011, which doesn’t begin to cover additional costs from rent, mortgages, inflation, health care and fuel, experts said.

There also are a lot of families right on the cusp of poverty as employers cut back hours and benefits. The tight housing market is another factor, so losing a job suddenly can stop a family from making it month to month to not at all, Woehrle said.

“The frustration is our funding is going down at the same time the number of people who need our help is going up,” Woehrle said on Friday.

He noted it will probably just get much worse if Congress continues its deadlock on solving the so-called “fiscal cliff,” which could result in further deep social service program cuts as tax revenues are not increased.

Meanwhile, the combined number of county residents living in poverty is 14 percent or 1,820, according to the “Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates.” The bureau’s searchable information is available online at www.census.gov/did/www/saipe/data/maps/index.html.

Woehrle said International Falls’ November poverty rate is at 16.3 percent.

Most of those in poverty are concentrated in large population centers, government officials said. Rural residents in need often complain of a chasm between them and the cities.

One measurable indicator, Woehrle, said is that now 38 percent of Koochiching County children utilize the free school-lunch program, up 10 percent from a decade ago.

He added his nonprofit human services agency is seeing an increase in the number of people seeking assistance for rent, utilities and other bills. A lot of them are new faces, too, not people trapped in “generational poverty.”

Meanwhile, the International Falls School District’s total population dropped by 68 residents from 10,156 to 10,088 in that four-year period. Local officials have said stable employment in the region and its isolation helped International Falls and its surrounding communities survive The Great Recession without too much damage, at least by comparison, or so the numbers suggest.

In 2011, the International Falls School District had 254 school-age children in families living in poverty out of 1,594 students. Four years earlier, nine fewer school-age children and their families lived in poverty.

Since the federal bureau started collecting the data in 1995, the lowest the national average for total school-age children living in poverty was 14.6 percent in 2000.

But not is all as it seems across the United States. Between 2007 and 2011, the national school-age poverty rate “showed a statistically significant increase in 832 counties, or 26 percent of all counties in the United States,” according to data from the Census Bureau’s program.