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IV. We believe:
Slowly, the profile of RI’s schools, children and
demographics is changing, presenting new challenges.
BASIC DEMOGRAPHICS AND SCHOOL-LEVEL STATISTICS
Who are we?
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Profile of RI Public Schools |
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The numbers 2000-2001 |
|
Students |
157,347 |
|
Teachers |
10,645 |
|
Districts |
38 |
|
Public Schools |
316 |
|
Area Career & Technical Schools |
8 |
|
State-operated Schools |
3 |
|
Charter Schools |
3 |
|
Collaborative Schools |
1 |
|
| |
According to the last Census, RI’s
population is growing, but slowly. RI’s percentage of
growth, 4.5%, ranks 45th out of the 50 states. Since
1990, our percentage of minorities has increased, from
10.7% to 18.1% minority. Our capitol city has become a
majority ‘minority’ city with the percentage of
non-Hispanic whites having dropped below 50% to 45.8%.
(See www.provplan.org
‘Census 2000’ for U.S. Census data as reported by the
Providence Plan.)
Worrisome is the fact that the percentage of families in
poverty – defined as a family of two adults and two
children living on $17,463, which itself is considered
unrealistically low – has increased since the last
Census by 31% for RI as a whole, and 34% for Providence.
In the boom times of the late 1990s, median family
income for the state as a whole increased by nearly 35%,
but Providence’s median family income lagged
considerably behind, with an increase of only 13%. The
Census shows that the percentage of children “at
risk” is increasing at a significant rate in RI.
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Percent of
children living in “high risk”
families according to Kids Count criteria |
|
 |
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Data source:
Children at Risk: State Trends 1990-2000 – "A first
look at Census 2000
supplementary survey data," a special publication by
the Annie E. Casey Foundation. |
Rhode Island has an alarmingly high percentage of
children living in “high risk” families, which are
defined in this context as children living in a family
with three or more of the following four economic risk
factors:
-
child lives in a family with income below the poverty
line
-
child lives in a single-parent family
-
child lives in a family where no parent has full-time,
year-round employment
-
child lives with a head of household who is a high
school drop out.
According to the Casey Foundation’s study, approximately
38,000 – 16% – of RI’s children live in high-risk
families, a rate higher than any other New England state
and significantly higher than the national average, 12%.
Only the District of Columbia and three states in the US
– Louisiana, Mississippi and New Mexico – have higher
rates of children with these multiple economic risk
factors. (New York’s rate is the same as ours.) Although
Rhode Island children have about the same likelihood of
being poor as the national average, they are much more
likely to live in families with multiple economic
barriers than are children in other states.
Increasingly, the children in our core urban
neighborhoods are living in poverty and that’s a crisis
unto itself. Furthermore, most of the state’s children
of color live in these poor urban neighborhoods,
accounting for 76% of the children in Providence and 72%
in Central Falls. (Since 1990, an increasing number of
children in Rhode Island are children of color, rising
from 16% of RI’s children under 18 in 1990 to 27% in
2000.) A child of color who’s living in a poor urban
neighborhood is already considered to be ‘at risk’ and
has a lot to overcome on the road to high achievement.
In Rhode Island, race is compounded by the powerful risk
factor of poverty. Children with multiple disadvantages are at the greatest
risk for failure.
In early childhood, cumulative risk factors have
negative effects on children’s intelligence, health,
developmental progress and behavior. As children grow
older, multiple risk factors predict a new set of
problems including teen idleness and unemployment,
dropping out of high school and teenage pregnancy. The
effect of multiple risk factors is not merely additive -
each additional risk factor significantly compounds the
likelihood of poor outcomes. The high incidence of
children exhibiting multiple risk factors supports the
need for comprehensive programs that address the
multiple needs of all family members.
Although families in Rhode Island are more likely to
face multiple economic risk factors, other positive
indicators of child well-being – including health
insurance coverage, timely prenatal care, receipt of
childhood immunizations, child and teen death rates –
are among the best in the country.
|
2001 Kids Count:
Child Well-Being Indicators for New England and
the U.S. Average |
| |
% in
Extreme
Poverty |
% in
Poverty |
2001
Poverty Rank |
2001
Overall Rank* |
|
Connecticut |
5% |
15% |
8th |
12th |
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Maine |
7% |
15% |
8th |
10th |
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Massachusetts |
8% |
17% |
23rd |
4th |
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New
Hampshire |
5% |
10% |
1st |
1st |
|
Rhode Island |
10% |
17% |
23rd |
21st |
|
Vermont |
5% |
13% |
2nd |
13th |
|
US Average |
8% |
20% |
Source: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2001
KIDS COUNT data book.
* Overall rank among the 50 state on a
composite of 10 indicators of child
well-being. |
|
RI’s rank of “21st” for “children living in poverty”
indicates our relative rate of increase in the rate of
child poverty, not the overall percentage of poor
children in a state. The ranking is deceptively benign
because the states are grouped together with
statistically similar states receiving the same ranking;
the lowest ranking is 30 – Alaska – and the second two
lowest rankings at 21 are Rhode Island and Washington
state. In other words, RI is third from the bottom out
of the 50 states.
The Office of Integrated
Social Services recommends: |
Using either the Child Opportunity Zone (COZ) or the
community-school model, schools need to partner with a
wide variety of outside agencies to strengthen the
community’s capacity to raise its children to bright
futures. For many years, we’ve heard that school cannot be all
things to all children. The stresses of our complex
society too often rob children of the supports they need
to be fully attentive to the education they receive.
Recently, more schools are reaching out to their
immediate communities both to organize existing
resources to make them more accessible to families and
to partner with them on programs specifically targeted
to their communities and students. Currently in RI,
seven school-based health centers and eight COZs run
programs to serve students and families beyond the realm
of strictly academic needs. According to our data, the COZs have successfully
increased parental participation in parent-teacher
conferences, visited 1,890 new families in their homes,
provided 2,245 children with after-school enrichment
programs, enrolled 310 families in RIte Care and helped
253 families access Starting Right reimbursements for
child care. COZs offer services as various as a Father’s
Group, GED classes in both English and Spanish, on-going
mental health services for both students and their
parents, summer camp and lead poisoning education.
Of the eight COZ schools that have students eligible for
state testing, five of them are ‘improving’ schools.
For example, Byfield School in Bristol has three
partners. Students in Mount Hope High School’s
early-childhood education classes apply their learning
through mentoring and tutoring Byfield students as well
as by assisting the staff with lunch and supervision.
Similarly, six Roger Williams University students
regularly help out in Byfield classrooms with reading,
with cafeteria and playground supervision and with the
after-school program. These students are education
majors or satisfying a community-service requirement.
Nine “senior buddies” from the Benjamin Church Senior
Center volunteer on a regular basis to read with and to
the students.
Cumberland’s B.F. Norton School is on the border of
Central Falls and has the highest percentage of
low-income children in Cumberland. We believe that its
COZ contributes to its being the only ‘improving’ school
in the district. Services include everything from a
Divorce Support group for children in grades 1-3 to
parenting programs and adult education. “Lunch buddies”
provides mentors who spend lunch and recess time each
week with carefully selected students. The school has a
number of health initiatives, including the Heart Health
Fair in which the whole school and their parents
participated, and trainings for both staff and parents
about asthma, nutrition and other health concerns.
Cunningham School, in Pawtucket, was the school where
RIDE and the Commissioner first released the Performance
Categories lists because the school is the model of a
challenged, urban school whose test scores improved
significantly. Some unquantifiable portion of that
success is due to the extensive activities of its COZ,
which really functions like a full-fledged
community-school program, offering community-building
programs for after-school, pre-school, adult literacy
and infant home-visiting for the school’s families,
among others. The COZ reaches out first to its students’
families, but also offers the adult programs to anyone
in the Zip Code area, indeed sometimes to anyone in the
City of Pawtucket. COZ leaders are aggressive about
going after grants and funding to support an extensive
list of programs, many of which have partners in the
larger community. |
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