Only in Babylon: More than half of US students now live in poverty

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More than half of US students now live in poverty: Analysis

A majority of students attending public schools in the United States are now living in poverty for the first time in half a century, according to a new analysis of US government data.

The analysis released Friday by the Southern Education Foundation shows that, overall, 51 percent of US schoolchildren came from low-income households and qualified for free or reduced-price lunch in 2013.

The Southern Education Foundation, a non-profit foundation that promotes quality education for disadvantaged students, analyzed data from National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is part of the US Department of Education.

In Mississippi, the poorest state in the US, 71 percent of public school students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, which means they come from low-income families.

The US government provides low-cost or free school meals to students from low-income families.

A student from a single-parent family would have qualified for free lunch in 2013 if household income had been less than $19,669 and for low-cost lunch if income had been less than $27,991.

“The [US] economy has simply failed to provide enough higher-income jobs to keep folks from being in or near poverty,” Steve Suitts, vice president of the Atlanta-based NCES foundation, said Friday by e-mail.

An increase in births among low-income families and a decline of births among wealthier households contributed to the change in poverty rate, said Suitts.

Poor children last made up a majority of public-school students in the 1960s, since US President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was able to reverse the trend of poverty for several decades.

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