Public school students have returned to classrooms around South Carolina and there’s reason to believe that more of them than ever are receiving free or reduced-price lunches. South Carolina Department of Education spokesman Jim Foster says there are no free lunch eligibility statistics yet for the current year or last year, but he says eligibility increased from 58 percent of students in 2006-07 to 59 percent the following year to 61 percent in 2008-09.
State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex says the latest figures definitely show a growing trend made worse under the weight of the recession and high unemployment.
AUDIO: Rex talks about the growing number of poor students (:52)
Since the 2006-07 school year, the poverty indices for students, a measurement that combines free-lunch and Medicaid eligibility, has increased by around one percent each year. Rex says the poverty indices moved from 72.7 percent in the 2006-07 school year to 74.7 in 2008-09, meaning that even two years ago three out of four students were living at or below the poverty level.
Rex says the poverty indices are a more realistic measurement of poverty than the free-lunch program because many students feel like there is a stigma attached to the free-lunch program.
Rex says the recently released Kids Count study indicates that there were only five states that were worse off than South Carolina when it comes to general well-being of all children.
It shows that they’re increasingly in single-family homes. It shows that their families are unemployed. The children are in much more stressful situations and they’re coming to school with greater needs. Some of them are academic and some of them are beyond academic. And teachers and counselors are dealing with that.
