SILER CITY — The strongest statements from the night, based on crowd response, came from Jazmin Mendoza Sosa.
Born in Mexico and raised in Siler City, Mendoza Sosa spoke with experience about being a child of poverty and working through the education system. She admitted that she had it good — both parents were in the home, basic needs were met — but she said many kids aren’t so lucky.
“They have less access to resources in the community,” she said. “Even tutors are expensive and a low-income child, their family is not able to support that. And often children are in neighborhoods that are primarily low-income, and sometimes because there’s no opportunities there can be illegal activities that are happening that give trauma at a young age.”
Mendoza Sosa, the student support specialist at Virginia Cross Elementary School who works with Communities in Schools in Chatham County, was one of five panelists who discussed the impact of poverty on public education last Wednesday at the One Chatham forum, co-hosted by the News + Record and the Our Chatham initiative from the Reese News Lab at the UNC Hussman School of Media and Journalism. Panelists shared from their varying experiences on the topic, but the message was more or less uniform:
Poverty significantly affects a child’s education from birth, but Chatham is doing well and has the opportunity to do more.
What poverty does
Listed as the No. 3 Health Impact Priority on the 2018 Chatham County Community Assessment, poverty significantly impacts everyone who is under it.
According to the CCCA, 13.3 percent of the county’s population, 20.8 percent of the county’s children and one-quarter of Chatham-ites under the age of five live below the poverty level. Black/African-American residents of Chatham are twice as likely and Hispanic/Latinx residents are almost three times as likely as white residents to live in poverty. The numbers aren’t dissimilar from the state percentages and the potential effects on education are stark.
The CCCA states that Chatham residents 25 and older without a high school degree are seven times more likely to live in poverty than those with a bachelor’s degree. The One Chatham panelists listed several other negative effects of poverty as related to education: less access to transportation, lower school readiness, lack of school supplies, poor nutrition and more Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) like emotional, physical and sexual abuse, mental health issues and other traumas.
While the forum’s panelists acknowledged all of those negatives, Chris Poston, Chatham County Schools’ executive director for elementary and middle grades education, said the public school district is making strides.
“What I see our teachers doing in a masterful way is building relationships with their students to really understand some of the struggles,” Poston said. “I see some of our teachers making a real powerful connection, understanding some of the trauma that some of our students are coping with and trying to bridge home and get them some of the resources in the community.”
When it comes to academic performance — as Chatham Education Foundation Executive Director Jamie Detzi said — some of Chatham’s poorest schools are “beating the odds.” Virginia Cross and Siler City Elementary — both of which have more than 85 percent of students receiving free and reduced lunch, a similar measurement to poverty — each shown continual improvement in recent years on their school performance grades as handed down by the state. SCE Principal Larry Savage, one of the forum’s panelists, said he tries to hire teachers who are ready to work hard.
“One of the most important things for us has been to develop a culture of hard work,” Savage said. “It is stressful. I want candidates to know that up front. I always tell them, ‘You’re going to get rewards, intrinsic rewards, from that hard work that you will never get other places.’ We’ve got to develop a sense of hard work among our students as well.”
Reaching into the community
Multiple panelists Wednesday night referenced wanting to wait at the hospital door to begin to give children educational resources.
Savage told a story about a meeting he was in where a child was being evaluated for participation in the Exceptional Children’s program. The child’s parent said she had never read to the kid growing up because, Savage said, “that’s what you do at school.”
“I thought to myself, ‘How could we be at that hospital door?’” he said.
Mendoza Sosa said there are some parents who “have an image of school that is negative,” so they may not be willing to ask for assistance. Also, as Detzi said, children growing up in poverty literally hear less words than those who don’t, which limits their academic development.
“I think it really starts the day that child’s born and builds up,” she said.
The panelists discussed ways schools and other organizations have and can reach into the community to meet parents while their kids are in school or even before. While he was a principal at Pittsboro Elementary School, Poston said, staff would take their curriculum nights — opportunities for parents to learn about what their kids are learning — into neighborhoods and share strategies for reading at home “in a fun way.”
“For some parents, school is threatening,” he said. “We realized we had to reach parents who weren’t coming to school in a different way.”
Members of the community who attended the panel also referenced the need for more outreach to children in poverty, particularly as a preventative measure for worse outcomes, while those students have educational potential. Siler City Police Chief Mike Wagner was one of those people.
“Without being able to challenge and direct that potential, they become members of my society, the criminal justice system,” Wagner said. “We’re so proud of doing things in probation and parole — and those are needed things — but we should really be doing more things for our youth.”
Both Detzi and Tych Cowdin, program director of Communities in Schools of Chatham County’s school-based programs, referenced the need for more funding and changes at the state level to help improve educational resources and break stigma around “poor” schools.
Detzi discussed the way school performance grades are evaluated — 80 percent for proficiency on state tests and 20 percent for growth — as “measuring poverty” in schools.
“As the percentage of economically disadvantage students go up, the letter grade goes down,” she said. “You’re not necessarily reflecting academic growth. You’re stigmatizing that school. You’re not giving the community the value of the school.”
Cowdin referenced state spending on education. A recent report by the education news outlet Education Week gave North Carolina a C-minus in its annual “Quality Counts” report on public education. That ranked the state 37th in the nation and was hampered by its 48th-in-the-nation mark for school spending —$9,367 per pupil compared to a national average of $12,756.
“It’s a big picture thing here,” Cowdin said. “It’s the state government. Let’s figure out from the sources ways to invest more in education, and I think that’s where a lot of the answers lie.”
Moving forward from here
With all the challenges and successes, panelists closed the evening by discussing their optimism moving forward and some pertinent steps that can be taken.
Of the eight elementary and middle schools that are designated Title I — 40 percent or more of students receiving free or reduced lunch — Poston said six met or exceeded expected growth measures.
“Our principals and our teachers,” he said, “they are really working hard to say, ‘We have some gaps in learning, but our students are going to close those gaps and exceed at high levels.’”
Mendoza Sosa added that students in poverty don’t necessarily lack the skills to succeed but the options to get there.
“There are a lot of students sitting in classroom that have a lot of potential that aren’t considered high-needs kids,” she said. “They are just doing good enough for the school system. Poverty, for them, it just takes away a lot of opportunities. They are students who may be able to strive and succeed more if they had a tutor or a community center where they could do good activities or learn social skills.”
She referenced her own experience as a child in poverty and her sister, who is about to have a child of her own. Comparing her experience to the child’s potential, she said there’s a lot more he will have available to him.
“I feel like poverty really took away opportunities,” she said. “It was difficult when I was in college. I didn’t have the social capital. I had an accent. It was hard to be in college. I’m thinking when we break those cycles, those that come generations after, they will have the opportunity to experience new cultural experiences.”
But what about the kids who may seem out of reach? Savage had an answer for that.
“We never give up,” he said. “We never give up on a kid. We find some way to support the child. We may not always succeed, but we always support the child.”
News + Record Publisher and Editor Bill Horner III moderated the discussion. He and Eric Ferkenhoff, who directs the Our Chatham program for UNC, and the panelists are developing a written summary of the event for later publication.
Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.
I feel like poverty really took away opportunities. It was difficult when I was in college. I didn’t have the social capital. I had an accent. It was hard to be in college. I’m thinking when we break those cycles, those that come generations after, they will have the opportunity to experience new cultural experiences
Jazmin Mendoza Sosa, student support specialist, Virginia Cross Elementary School