Closing in on the "tipping point"

Poverty rates are soaring in Bristol.
In just the past four months, 5 percent more elementary school children in Bristol have successfully applied for free or reduced-price school lunches because their families don't have much money.
Susan Moreau, the assistant school superintendent, said that applications are coming in daily. Many of them are the result, she said, of mothers or fathers getting laid off in the slowing economy.
In all, officials said, 37 percent of the city's elementary school students are getting discounted or free lunches.
To Tom O'Brien, a Board of Education member, the numbers are alarming.
O'Brien said that studies show that once the poverty rate hits 40 percent in a community, it's almost impossible to slow the slide. He said that "it almost always jumps to 60 percent within five or six years" after reaching that tippoing point, the result of the spiraling impact of rising taxes to cope with the cost and a middle class fleeing for greener pastures.
The community should be "very, very concerned" that poverty keeps going up, O'Brien said. "This is a very scary thing," he said.
Unless city leaders find a way to attack blighted housing and crack the whip on out-of-town landlords and slumlords, O'Brien said the trend is clear.
Without a change, he said, "We will be New Britain. We will be Meriden. We will be East Hartford."
"The city cannot just sit here and hope it goes away," O'Brien said.
School Superintendent Philip Streifer said that rising numbers of poor children make it tough on educators, too.
He said he was shocked to see how many of the incoming kindergarten students in Bristol last fall didn’t know the kinds of basic facts, from colors to letters, that they should have learned beforehand.
“These kids are unprepared to learn,” he said, adding that perhaps a third of the incoming youngsters didn’t have the backgrounds they should.
Starting off “so far behind” their peers in more affluent communities and families, it’s tough for them to catch up, officials said.
He said that poverty is also the main reason that 40 percent of the students in an average elementary school class in Bristol move during each school year, half of them out of the town and half to another school district.
That puts a burden on both teachers and students because of the loss of continuity.

*******
Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com