It's time for all of us to own the '66 percent'


  • December 7, 2015
  • /   Randy Hammer
  • /   education

Depressing.

I knew Pensacola and Escambia County had a poverty issue. Who doesn’t anymore? But it didn’t really hit me how much of a problem we have until Shannon Nickinson showed me a copy of the “Pockets of Poverty” map that she and Ron Stallcup created for a report that ran in the Pensacola News Journal last week.

And there’s only one way to describe that map and report that the Studer Community Institute and Rick Harper’s staff at the University of West Florida worked on together: Depressing. Unless you live in Santa Rosa County.

Harper had a commentary in the PNJ last weekend that talked about how Santa Rosa benefits from Escambia’s economic struggles. Although the vast majority of jobs in the Pensacola metro are in Escambia, so is more than 90 percent of the metro’s poverty. And that poverty is a key reason more and more people who work in Escambia decide to live in Santa Rosa.

For Escambia County, the “Pockets of Poverty” report offered a sobering view of our community:

— The percentage of households with children living in poverty exceeds 10 percent in 30 of Escambia County’s 71 Census tracts.

— Eight of the tracks in Escambia have 19 percent or more of its households with children living in poverty. The annual median income in these eight tracts is $22,835. The majority of these households are either bordering or inside Pensacola’s city limits.

The “Pockets of Poverty” research followed an earlier report by the Institute and UWF that revealed 34 percent of our children are unprepared for their first day of kindergarten in the Escambia County School District. That same report also showed that 34 percent of students in the district do not graduate from high school on time.

Perhaps the most depressing number in the report, however, showed that 66 percent of children in the district are on a free or reduced-price school meal plan. For a family of four to qualify for the free-lunch plan, annual household income cannot exceed $31,525.

What does it say about Escambia’s middle class when 66 percent of parents with children in a public school can’t afford to buy their child a school lunch?

“We have to talk about this more as a community and broaden our understanding of what factors are creating this kind of failure for our community,” said Andrea Krieger, president and CEO of the United Way of Escambia County. “We simply have to do a better job of owning these issues, issues like high school graduation rates and kindergarten readiness, which in many ways are tied to the poverty that we are known for in Escambia County. The challenge for us as a community is that more of us need to step up.”

Under Krieger’s leadership, the United Way has narrowed its focus to three main issues: education, financial stability and health.

“We’re particularly focused on kindergarten readiness, high school graduation and reducing the number of people living below the federal poverty level,” said Krieger.

According to the Pensacola Metro Dashboard, which the Institute updated in September, these are indeed three of most critical issues holding back Escambia County. And Krieger is absolutely right that our community must do a better job of owning these issues.

But when I’m out talking to people, I often wonder if the community sees our graduation rates and kindergarten readiness as a problem, as issues that hold back Escambia. Krieger says she sometimes wonders the same thing.

“I hear from so many folks who say, ’It’s not my problem, it’s not my child,’” said Krieger. “Well, it’s all of our problem. If you look around our community, we are all suffering the results of that kind of attitude.”

Krieger is right again. And that, too, is depressing.

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