Milwaukee schools feel impact on learning
One out of three school-age children in Milwaukee lived with a family in poverty in 2005, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released Wednesday.
Milwaukee ranked third worst in the state with 33% of students living in poverty in 2005.
Milwaukee ranked sixth highest overall among the nation’s 70 largest school districts; only Cleveland, New Orleans, Detroit, Fresno, Calif., and St. Louis had higher percentages of children living with families in poverty.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said creating jobs, resolving school-funding issues, getting more fathers involved in raising their children and getting kids to stay in school are key elements in reversing poverty’s grip on the city.
“I literally go into classrooms and say, ‘I’m Tom Barrett, I’m mayor of Milwaukee, and I’m begging you to stay in school and work hard,'” Barrett said. “We know that’s the long-term solution. The short-term solutions are job retention and work force development.”Overall, 12% of Wisconsin children ages 5 through 17 lived with a family in poverty. Within many school districts in southeastern Wisconsin, the rates were extremely low.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=705506
The school districts in southeastern Wisconsin are overwhelmingly white, while Milwaukee is a “black town,” whose blacks have been disenfranchised by welfare state policies and offshoring of low/no skill work to the Third World. Doubtless the report is yet another attempt to scare up even more handouts from white working people’s tax dollars, but still: what an indictment of not only multiracialism but of US imperialism; how dare the US waste millions on Mideast war when vast populations of its “own” children go without enough to eat?