The Homeless Children’s Playtime Project began in 2003 to provide kids in dire conditions a chance to play with toys and read books with support from volunteers. (Photo by Naomi Harris)

jonetta rose barras: Child poverty in DC is no myth

By jonetta rose barras On Nov 27, 2019 Last updated Dec 5, 2019

The numbers are staggering: 32,000 children are living in poverty in DC. When I heard those statistics earlier this month during the DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy’s conference on the “Young and Poor: The Trauma of Child Poverty,” I thought perhaps someone had gotten the figures wrong. After all, the District is a beacon of prosperity, or at least that is the way it is promoted by Mayor Muriel Bowser, DC Council members, various civic leaders — even myself on occasion.

However, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2019 Kids Count Data Report, released earlier this year, set the record straight. The child poverty rate in DC was 26% in 2017 — the year for which most recent data is available. By comparison, the national rate was 18%.

Those numbers represent real people who are struggling among us. In many instances, they are people who have been sidelined by public policies that treat the symptoms and not the disease.

“Poverty isn’t an accident but the result of [public] policies,” Brenda Rhodes Miller, the DC Campaign’s executive director, told me in a post-conference interview.

Some might say failed public policies. Consider, for example, a law that was created in DC to direct more money to at-risk students: Those funds have been repeatedly misdirected. Council members currently are advocating for additional laws to prevent suicides among children and teens, yet politicians have refused to hold anyone accountable for violating existing laws on the subject — even after a 12-year-old girl took her own life in 2018 while in her dormitory at a Ward 7 public charter school. In fact, government emails I have seen indicate that at-large Council member David Grosso, head of the Committee on Education, apparently has claimed legislative immunity to keep from testifying in the court case surrounding the death of Stormiyah Denson-Jackson. Meanwhile, the legislature immediately pushed for accountability when a government agency signed a contract allowing for the use of a public playing field in Ward 2 by a private school.

Homeless children living in hotels can’t make their way to school on time. The District has belatedly said it will establish a shuttle service come January. Still, the poverty that marks their lives will remain long after the shuttle drops them back at their over-occupied, one-room dwellings.

Don’t think this a typical Thanksgiving column. I am not soliciting donations. I will not direct anyone to some specific location for a one-day feast. Poverty is not a seasonal, temporary affliction.

It is persistent and often generational. “Poverty is the inheritance no one wants,” said Kristy Arnold, executive director of LIFT-DC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping families climb out of poverty to success.

Lisa Hamilton, president and chief executive officer of the Casey Foundation, noted in the organization’s 2019 report that the national child poverty rate was 18% in 1990 — the same rate as today, meaning 13.4 million children live in such circumstances across the country. “Parents [are] working hard to provide for their families. … But more families [face] high housing costs, and a greater percentage [live] in high-poverty areas.

“Even as the economy has grown, many kids and their families are still being left behind,” added Hamilton.

People in poverty are often perceived as being lazy or welfare cheats, Miller noted. “There is so much contempt in this country for people who are poor,” she said. “Most problems we see as intractable really aren’t caused by individuals; they are systemic.”

My colleague Gordon Chaffin wrote a powerful column about his struggle to stay afloat financially. During my childhood, I watched my mother work two, sometimes three, jobs to ensure my siblings and I had a few comforts. Possessing a meager wardrobe, I found myself two or three times a week washing and ironing my pink-pleated skirt and white blouse so that I could present a clean, crisp appearance in the junior high school I attended not far from the public housing complex I called home.

The Casey Foundation report called “troubling” the number of children growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods as I did. Not only do those communities lack economic resources, the families who live there also lack social capital, said Miller. Often people in such areas don’t have anyone from whom they can borrow money when facing an emergency; they don’t know anyone who can help them get their child a job or even help them find better housing.

In DC, 25.8% of children lived in poverty in 2016, down from 31.7% in 2000. However, the portrait is less favorable in communities east of the Anacostia River: 41% of the children in Ward 7 lived in poverty in 2016, up from 37% in 2000. In Ward 8, 48.5% lived in poverty, up from 47%, according to the Casey Foundation’s data. Why is the problem in those communities increasing?

During her first term in office, Bowser created a new position — deputy mayor for greater economic opportunity — asserting that that individual would help improve circumstances east of the Anacostia River and in other parts of the city with persistent pockets of poverty. The poverty statistics suggest little improved during those four years. I’m doubtful that the successor — an Office of East of the River Coordination created this year under the city administrator — will prove more effective.

In fact, District leaders have mostly been tinkering around the edges, with a hodgepodge of seemingly disjointed but expensive programs. They could consider advancing an omnibus anti-child-poverty program that doesn’t just throw money at administrators who caretake the issues but actually drills down to transform the environment that enables poverty.

A multilayered, aggressive and comprehensive approach is critical. Slaying child poverty requires an understanding — articulated by many of the speakers at the “Young and Poor” conference, including Miller — that the issues are interconnected. They are systemic — not brief, episodic or satiated with a well-cooked turkey, dressing and candied yams.

jonetta rose barras is a DC-based freelance writer and host of The Barras Report television show. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.