Previously, in Part 1, I used the same census data that the City of Whitewater posted on its website to show that we have a family poverty rate roughly twice that of surrounding towns. In this post, we’ll review the annual data on family poverty that the Whitewater Unified School District posts. Those data show that – each year over the last ten – family poverty in the district has stayed constant or increased as a percentage of all families.
I’ll begin with a few preliminary remarks. First, although school district data are for all the communities in the district, Whitewater is – naturally – by far the largest contributor to the data. The City of Whitewater dwarfs in size all the other communities that comprise the WUSD.
Second, the district presents annual information from the last ten years, and that gives us a good impression of the trend. Third, the district’s measure is more significant than the overall family poverty rate, because the district data pertains specifically to those families with children of school age – children being powerless to advance their own circumstances, and being especially vulnerable to the life-altering prospects of an upbringing in poverty.
From 1997-1998 through 2006-2007, there has been a marked increase in the percentage of children of impoverished families with the WUSD.:
| YEAR | PERCENTAGE OF CHILDREN IN POVERTY |
| 1997-1998 | 21% |
| 1998-1999 | 21% |
| 1999-2000 | 21% |
| 2000-2001 | 21% |
| 2001-2002 | 23% |
| 2002-2003 | 24% |
| 2003-2004 | 25% |
| 2004-2005 | 25% |
| 2005-2006 | 26% |
| 2006-2007 | 27% |
From 1997-1998 to 2006-2007, the increase from 21% to 27% represents a staggering jump of over twenty-five percent in the percentage of children within the district in poverty.
In no year during the last ten did the percentage of poverty among school age children ever decline. Not once. We have made no gains against poverty levels, unless one would wish to claim dubiously that conditions might otherwise have grown even worse.
This situation should be a source of chagrin: we have more poor families by percentage than neighboring towns, and more poor families with school-age students than a decade ago. How often have you heard people in town ridicule other nearby towns, aesthetically or culturally? You know, and I know, that smug residents of Whitewater look down on Palmyra and Jefferson, etc. Our situation is – in one of the ways that should matter – so troubled that we have no reason to ridicule any other places.
America is awash in prosperity, and national poverty figures are down from the year before. America has seen year after year of economic growth, and those increases in aggregate wealth produced a decline in poverty in America. We live the most productive nation in all the world, now or ever before. Our vast commercial republic is a sophisticated, technologically advanced place, producing well over a dozen trillion dollars annually. Free markets have lifted this nation to a high peak, and produced in hundreds of millions a standard of living others seek to achieve.
Paradoxically, while America waxes, Whitewater wanes. Look around at our many advantages, and recognize the truth they reveal: even with hospitable physical conditions, and a university campus, we lag nearby towns. We’re no distant desert town, or remote Alaskan village, and yet with all we have, we’ve done less than we should have. For every salary increase, additional public-sector employee, or overly-intrusive regulatory effort, our condition has grown, in meaningful ways, no better – it’s grown worse.