Why Are Children Less Valuable Than Guns in America? IT'S TIME TO PROTECT CHILDREN

Release Date: December 18, 2015

Three years after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut where a lone 20-year-old gunman wielding an assault weapon snuffed out 26 child and teacher lives, our nation has done shamefully little to protect children instead of guns. This week more than ten thousand people attended over 100 Orange Walks in 43 states to stand up and deliver a rallying cry that we must and can end gun violence in America, according to Moms Demand Action – a cry that must continue and get louder and louder until our tone deaf political leaders hear or are retired from office.

New data this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show 2,525 children and teens died by gunfire in our nation in 2014; one child or teen death every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week. What is this moral                                                  perversity in our midst that values guns more than children and human life?

In the three years since Sandy Hook’s nightmare we have not passed even one common sense federal gun law to reduce gun violence and deaths and protect children from our out-of- control scourge of violence. Universal background checks work. The evidence is clear. The overwhelming majority of gun owners and non-gun owners support stricter background checks, yet the Congress has done nothing. How do we change this?  

Seventy-eight children under 5 died by guns last year – 30 more than the 48 law enforcement officers killed by guns in the line of duty. Is there no shame in the shooters or in the lawmakers who protect the shooters or in the industry who makes profits off the blood of children? Shouldn’t Republicans, Democrats, and Independents of every race, income, color and faith be able to agree that child gun deaths are a moral blight on our nation which we have the means but not the will to prevent and change course?

Last month our hearts at the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) were broken by the death of our extraordinarily generous, creative, and decades-long partner and board member Pat Fallon, cofounder of the award-winning Fallon Worldwide advertising agency. Some of his agency’s most searing images depicted the relentless carnage of gun violence that kills and maims thousands of children year after year. CDF began our antiviolence campaign in 1994 after Peter Hart Research Associates conducted intergenerational focus groups of Black youths and adults. We were shocked to learn their number one concern was gun violence: Black male youths didn’t believe they’d live to adulthood and Black parents saw gun violence as the number one threat to their children.

Then came Columbine with two White teen boys wearing trench coats who shot and killed 13 people and injured 21 others in a rampage at their school that shocked the nation. Shouldn’t it be illegal to sell and buy these weapons of war in America that turn our streets, schools, and workplaces into killing fields? Surely we are better than this. How can we let our lawmakers stand by and do nothing to stop the slaughter of innocents?  Since 1963, over three times more children and teens have died from guns in America than U.S. soldiers killed in action in wars abroad.

Pat Fallon and his creative colleagues did everything in their power to help bring us to our senses over the years to staunch the tide of gun violence with these and other powerful violence prevention campaigns urging us to value our children more than our guns. Why is a child’s right to live less important than a gunman’s right to kill and the gun manufacturers’ profits?

Children are certainly not the only ones in danger in our gun-saturated nation which accounts for less than 5 percent of the global population but owns between 35 to 50 percent of all civilian-owned guns in the world. Recent estimates of U.S. civilian gun ownership are as high as 310 million — about one gun for each person. U.S. military and law enforcement agencies possess approximately 4 million guns. Isn’t there something horribly wrong with this picture? A gun in the home makes the likelihood of homicide three times higher, suicide three to five times higher, and accidental death four times higher. For each time a gun in the home injures or kills in self-defense, there are 11 completed and attempted gun suicides, seven gun criminal assaults and homicides, and four unintentional shooting deaths or injuries. Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native children and teens are disproportionately likely to die from a gun.

These horrendous facts are not acts of God. They are our indefensible choices as Americans. We must urgently push policymakers to confront and end our national gun violence epidemic as the huge public health crisis it is and there are some steps we can all take now:

• End the federal ban on gun research and fund research on effective gun violence prevention strategies. Why is the National Rifle Association (NRA) so afraid of the truth and why do our lawmakers and voters capitulate to NRA bullying? Almost 20 years ago Congress blocked the CDC’s gun research funding by 95 percent. The agency’s budget that year was cut by the exact amount provided the previous year to study prevention of gun injuries and fatalities. Similar restrictions were put on research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2011. Public health professionals continue to believe studying our epidemic gun violence crisis will lead to new understandings of its root causes and possible breakthroughs in new approaches to reduce the daily death toll caused by guns. This is the same process that occurred after focused research on automobile deaths in the 20th century. In 2013, President Obama signed an executive order clarifying that the CDC and NIH are not prohibited from studying gun violence and included $10 million in funding to study prevention of gun injuries and fatalities. That funding was never approved by Congress. Over the years, some academic institutions and organizations have stepped in to fund some excellent research but a much more coordinated and concentrated research effort is crucial to make gun violence reduction one of the first major public health goals of the 21st century. It is time to fire the NRA as our head of national security and of our national public health research agenda. Even former Representative Jay Dickey (R-AR), author of the current language banning gun violence research recently noted that “doing nothing is no longer an acceptable solution.”

• Continue to broaden the range of supporters for effective gun prevention action at the federal, state, and local levels. Transforming change is slow and very very hard. It requires dogged, sustained effort from a critical mass of determined citizens. We cannot stay numb, cowed or intimidated by bullies who value profits over human life. Do not let your passion for stopping relentless gun violence wane however long it takes. Insist political leaders support common sense universal background checks including checks on private and internet sales. Restore the assault weapon ban and limit the size of ammunition clips. Require that gun owners carry liability insurance. Promote the development of smart guns; and require guns be stored unloaded and locked in the home. And we must stop guns being the only unregulated consumer product in our nation while killing tens of thousands of children and adults every year.

• Pledge to ASK about guns in the home where your children visit. Make clear that you will not let your child play in a house with unlocked guns just as you would not let your child ride in a car without a seatbelt. One in three homes with children in the United States has a gun. If you don’t own a gun, one of your child’s friends’ families likely does. It may be awkward to ask about guns in the home but it may help save a child’s life. More than 19 million parents and grandparents have taken the Asking Saves Kids (ASK) pledge promoted by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and the American Academy of Pediatrics to ask about guns in the homes where their children play. Join them today and promote this important message in your community and on social media.

• Divest in gun companies. Don’t invest in violence and death. Are you one of the many Americans whose retirement plans include gun manufacturers’ stock? There are tens of millions of Americans with 401Ks. Let’s ask and check now to see whether our 401K retirement funds are invested in gun and ammunition companies and make a change if they are. Let’s ask if our religious, philanthropic, nonprofit organizations and universities with endowments are supporting gun violence through investments. Learn more.

In this season when Christians profess to believe God entered history as a poor child seeking peace in our world, let us protect children, not guns. As tireless fighter Pat Fallon reminded us—we can and must do better.

The Education Inequality Struggle

This has been a hard year for poor children and children of color in a gridlocked and cantankerous Congress. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replacing the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted after gutting a strong federal role in education policy designed to protect these children and jeopardizing their opportunity for a fair and adequate education to prepare them for work in our globalizing economy. Over the past 50 years under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act too many states violated their responsibility to serve their poor and non-White children equitably, did not comply with the law and misused huge amounts of the funds intended for poor children for other purposes. With the loss of federal accountability in the new Act, I hope we will not see the mistakes of the past repeated and poor children fall further behind.

In 1969 the Children’s Defense Fund’s parent body the Washington Research Project and the Legal Defense Fund conducted a thorough study of how funds from Title I of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act were being spent through on-the-ground monitoring and examination of federal audit reports from states. In our report, Title I ESEA: Is It Helping Poor Children?, we answered a resounding “no” as states widely used federal money as general state aid for all their children without targeting it to eligible children most in need, sometimes to maintain still segregated and unequal schools, and squandered money intended to lift achievement levels of poor children on things like swimming pools in suburban White schools.

Massive and continuing state and local violations of accountability and poor achievement levels for the neediest children resulted in passage during the George W. Bush Administration of the No Child Left Behind Act with bipartisan support including Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman George Miller — which attempted to build in a much needed stronger federal accountability role. The new Every Student Succeeds Act begins a new era but without needed federal accountability and relying on hopes that all states will fulfill their crucial responsibility to educate all their children fairly and prepare them for work and life. To ensure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, all of us — every parent, child and community advocate who cares about our nation’s future — will have to work very very hard.

It is nation threatening when we look at how our children in public schools are performing in the fourth and eighth grades in 2015 and see more than 75 percent of lower income children, more than 80 percent of Black children and more than 73 percent of Latino children cannot read or compute at grade level. What is a child going to do in a competitive globalizing world if he cannot read and compute at very basic levels, is unable to graduate from high school, or is shunted into a Cradle to Prison Pipeline™ accelerated by unjust zero tolerance school discipline and misdirected special education policies?

There is some good news in the new Act. Thanks to the leadership of Senator Patty Murray and Representative Bobby Scott, working with Senator Lamar Alexander and Representative John Kline, some of the most harmful proposals were excluded including one that would have diverted Title I funds from high poverty to low poverty schools — the portability provision. The new law requires states to continue to track the performance of all children and subgroups of children by race, ethnicity, disability, and English language learners, with data breakdowns by gender. While states will set their own goals and timelines for academic progress, their plans will require federal approval. States will be required to help fix schools where student test scores are in the lowest five percent, where achievement gaps are greatest, and in all high schools where fewer than 67 percent of students graduate on time using evidence-based programs approved by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Act takes significant positive steps to help students in foster care who have not had targeted attention before by state and local education agencies. Although public child welfare agencies have had obligations for ensuring educational stability for these children for a number of years, the new law helps ensure their school stability and educational success. This should help prevent students from needlessly changing schools — falling further and further behind with each move. It ensures they can remain in their same school when they enter foster care and change placements unless it is not in their best interest. It also requires these children be immediately enrolled in a new school without the typically required records when a school change is necessary to eliminate gaps in their education, and encourages the prompt transfer of records when a child in foster care enters a new school. Both school districts and child welfare agencies must have reciprocal points of contact for students in foster care, and both systems must have a point of contact for them at the state level. Local education and child welfare agencies also must collaborate to develop and implement a plan for transportation for those students who will need it to remain in their school of origin. New data on high school graduation rates for students in foster care will help track their progress.

There are important improvements in the Act for more than 1.3 million children and youth experiencing homelessness also focusing on school stability and success. State and local education agencies must ensure their Title I plans promote identification, enrollment, attendance and school stability of these children. Local education agencies must reserve a portion of their education funding to support homeless children. State report cards must include dis-aggregated information on graduation rates and other achievement measures for these children. The new Act increases by more than 20 percent the authorized funding level for the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Program which offers critical protections for homeless children.

As hard as it has been for poor and other vulnerable children to move ahead and to make adequate progress even with federal accountability, it will be even harder without it. Parents, community leaders, public officials and child advocates must hold state, district and school leaders accountable for establishing and meeting performance targets for children. They must join with state and local education agencies to insist on increased resources to address the needs of the most vulnerable children. Child advocates and parents must ask for and review state and local school plans and notify the U.S. Department of Education and local media if they think school districts are neglecting some children or violating the new law. At stake are millions of children’s hopes, lives and futures. Those unable to read and compute and graduate from high school are being sentenced to social and economic death. They deserve better in the world’s biggest economy.

- See more at: http://www.childrensdefense.org/newsroom/child-watch-columns/child-watch-documents/TheEducationInequalityStruggle.html#sthash.4IQYhq3l.dpuf

Healing a Child's Broken Heart

It’s always very challenging for a parent when their child has a serious health condition. It’s even more challenging when their child has a serious condition but has no health insurance to cover the needed care and emergencies. Both were true for one Texas mother whose 12-year-old daughter Evelyn was diagnosed with a heart defect. Evelyn often ended up at her school nurse’s office complaining of shortness of breath. When the nurse encouraged her mother to take her in to the doctor, Evelyn’s mother, who bakes cakes for a living, explained that Evelyn was uninsured and she couldn’t afford the specialist fees that ran into the hundreds of dollars per visit. But the nurse had attended a presentation for school district staff on the importance of connecting students to available health coverage and knew she could put Evelyn’s family in touch with an outreach worker from the Children’s Defense Fund-Texas office to help her apply for insurance.
 
CDF-Texas helped Evelyn’s mother with her application and with the critical follow up after the first application was misfiled. Once those steps were taken the family was rightfully approved and Evelyn was finally able to obtain the health care she desperately needed. Soon after she had open heart surgery to replace a non-functional heart valve. Specialists at the Pediatric Heart Clinic told Evelyn’s family she was very lucky to have had the surgery when she did. Her mother says, “It was not about luck, it was a blessing!” Evelyn’s family says they feel happy and blessed to have had help applying for health coverage when it seemed they had no hope.

Evelyn is one of millions of children whose story now has a happier ending. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Medicaid program, which together with the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) has brought the number of uninsured children to an historic low. Medicaid and CHIP provide comprehensive and affordable health coverage to more than 44 million children—that’s 57 percent of all children in America. With the new coverage options offered by the Affordable Care Act, 93 percent of all children now have health coverage.

But we can never stop working to reach children like Evelyn who haven’t yet been connected to coverage. More than 5.2 million children under age 18 were uninsured in 2013. The overwhelming majority live with working parents and are citizens. More than a third live in three states—California, Texas, and Florida. Uninsured children are more likely to be children of color, children ages 13-18, and children who live in rural areas. More than half —3.7 million—are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but not yet enrolled.


That’s why CDF continues to work, in partnership with AASA, The School Superintendents Association, to encourage school districts to help get all students the health coverage they need to learn and succeed in school. Our goal is to make school-based child health outreach and enrollment a routine and ongoing part of school district operations. The model is built around a basic question districts add to their school registration materials: “Does your child have health insurance?” Parents who answer “no” or “don’t know” are flagged and receive information from school district staff on Medicaid, CHIP, or other health coverage options. But it doesn’t stop there. Parents also can receive application assistance and often are introduced to community partners to help them successfully navigate the enrollment process the way Evelyn’s mother was connected in Texas.

CDF-Texas with its partners pioneered this technique in the Houston Independent School District almost a decade ago and since then CDF and AASA have partnered with districts in California, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, including small and large, urban, rural, and suburban school systems, serving elementary through high schools with a rainbow of  Black, Latino, Asian, and White students. Superintendents, principals, teachers, school nurses and other staff have gained a clearer understanding of the critical links between children’s health, school attendance, and ability to achieve in school. Many are now leading public education efforts to engage parents and the broader community in events geared to health and wellness. Keeping children healthy is a win for everyone.

Dr. Kavin Dotson

As Dr. Kavin Dotson, Director of Student Services for the Lynwood Unified School District in California, put it at a recent convening at CDF Haley Farm in Tennessee, “we were unaware of the fact that there were so many students in our district that did not have health insurance.” He now believes that “every school in our country is going to make a 100 percent commitment to ensure that all students are enrolled in some type of health insurance that will meet their health needs.

You too can take action now to spread the word about the importance of health coverage in your own communities with help from the Connecting Kids to Coverage national campaign. Through the end of this month it has print materials and TV and radio ads in English and Spanish that you can customize to reach parents and others assisting children. Children can enroll in CHIP or Medicaid at any time.

How frustrating it is that at the very same time we are celebrating Medicaid’s long and successful history and the recent bipartisan two-year CHIP funding extension and building on successful outreach and enrollment strategies, these critical child health programs are under attack in Congress. The fiscal year 2016 budget resolution proposes deep cuts in Medicaid and structural changes in both Medicaid and CHIP that will jeopardize their reach and make it even more difficult for many more children like Evelyn to get the coverage and care they desperately need. But there’s still time to demand that Congress stop the cuts and efforts to dismantle the structure of Medicaid and CHIP. Why would they fool around with something that is working so well for parents and children? All of us must work together to move forward not backwards to make sure all children get the health care they need to live and learn and thrive.

Criminalizing Poverty

“Held captive.” It was how one 13-year-old described the feeling of growing up poor in our wealthy nation, and for more and more Americans living in poverty, this feeling isn’t just a metaphor. The recent Department of Justice report on police and court practices in Ferguson, Missouri put a much needed spotlight on how a predatory system of enforcement of minor misdemeanors and compounding fines can trap low-income people in a never-ending cycle of debt, poverty, and jail. In Ferguson this included outrageous fines for minor infractions like failing to show proof of insurance and letting grass and weeds in a yard get too high. In one case a woman who parked her car illegally in 2007 and couldn’t pay the initial $151 fee has since been arrested twice, spent six days in jail, paid $550 to a city court, and as of 2014 still owed the city $541 in fines, all as a result of the unpaid parking ticket. The Department of Justice found each year Ferguson set targets for the police and courts to generate more and more money from municipal fines. And Ferguson isn’t alone. The criminalization of poverty is a growing trend in states and localities across the country.

The investigation of Ferguson’s practices came after the killing of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer, and last month the practice of criminalizing poverty made headlines again after Walter Scott was killed in North Charleston, South Carolina. Scott was shot in the back by police officer Michael Slager on April 4 as he ran away after being pulled over for a broken taillight. Scott had already served time in jail for falling behind on child support, and on the day he was stopped there was a warrant out for his arrest for falling behind again. His family believes his fear of going back to jail caused him to run from the broken taillight stop. His brother told The New York Times that Walter Scott already felt trapped: “Every job he has had, he has gotten fired from because he went to jail because he was locked up for child support,” said Rodney Scott, whose brother was most recently working as a forklift operator. “He got to the point where he felt like it defeated the purpose.” A 2009 review of county jails in South Carolina found that 1 in 8 inmates was behind bars for failure to pay child support. Rodney Scott remembered his brother trying to explain to a judge that he simply did not make enough money to pay the amount ordered by the court: “And the judge said something like, ‘That’s your problem. You figure it out.’”

The Institute for Policy Studies recently released a groundbreaking new reporthighlighting the policies and practices that have led to increased criminalization of poverty, and that report and similar studies are finally shining a light on the way some municipalities are criminalizing poor people just for being poor. The United States legally ended the practice of debtor’s prisons in 1833, and the Supreme Court ruled in Bearden v. Georgia (1983) that it is unconstitutional to imprison those who can’t afford to pay their debt or restitution in criminal cases, unless the act of not paying debt or restitution is “willful.” But poor people are being increasingly targeted with fines and fees for misdemeanors and winding up in illegal debtors’ prisons when they can’t pay—and in some cases, then being charged additional fees for court and jail costs. A recent investigation by National Public Radio, the New York University Brennan Center for Justice, and the National Center for State Courts cited a study estimating between 80-85 percent of inmates now leave prison owing debt for court-imposed costs, restitution, fines and fees. In some jurisdictions defendants are charged for their room and board during lockup, probation and parole supervision, drug and alcohol abuse treatment, DNA samples, and even their constitutional right to a public defender. When poor people can’t pay those fees either, the cycle of debt and jail time continues.

The private companies providing probation services in more than half of the states are some of the biggest winners when poor people are targeted. If people on probation can’t afford the fees they are charged, they breach their probation contract; this can result in more jail time, making it even less likely that they’ll be earning the money they need, and people under the supervision of these private probation companies often become liable for charges exceeding the initial cost of their ticket or fine. Federal law also prohibits people in breach of probation from receiving a range of benefits, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and Supplemental Security Income—once again, exacerbating the cycle of poverty, probation, and prison.

And state and local policies establish barriers that make it more difficult for people who have served any time in prison, including those there because they were poor, to re-integrate into society. According to a study conducted by the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section, there are more than 38,000 documented statutes nationwide creating collateral consequences for people with criminal convictions including barriers to housing, employment, voting, and many public benefits. By denying these citizens access to basic services they need to survive, our policies needlessly increase the risk of recidivism and continue to leave people truly trapped—and when we extend the cycle of poverty by criminalizing poor people, there are only a few greedy winners and many, many losers.

All in the Family

My mother was doing drugs, specifically cocaine, crack cocaine... I almost
died. They said that I was either going to be deaf or retarded or I wasn’t
going to survive past childhood or infancy because there were so many chemicals
in my system.

The odds were stacked against Britiny Lee before she was born. Her mother was addicted to drugs, like Britiny’s grandfather and many others in their poverty-stricken Cleveland neighborhood. Britiny’s mother used drugs throughout her pregnancy and went to prison for a year just after Britiny’s birth. As a poor, Black “crack baby” with an addicted, incarcerated mother and an absent father, Britiny started life in danger. Being born into an unstable poor family or to a single, teen, incarcerated, or absent parent are all known risk factors in America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crisis. The disadvantages millions of poor children and children of color face from birth along the continuum to and through adulthood—which can  include no or inadequate prenatal and health care; no or little quality early childhood education and enrichment; child abuse and neglect; failing schools; grade retention, suspension, and expulsion; questionable special education placements; dropping out of school; unaddressed mental health problems; violent drug infested neighborhoods; and disproportionate involvement in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems—cumulate and converge and funnel so many poor children of color into a pipeline and trajectory that too often leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment, and premature death. Entering the child welfare system would have been still another risk factor for baby Britiny but she was lucky. 

Watch Britiny's Story

That was where Britiny’s grandmother stepped in who already had custody of Britiny’s older brother and sister. She brought Britiny home too and Britiny says, “My grandmother stepped up to the plate to raise us because she didn’t want us to go into the foster care system.” Britiny’s grandmother didn’t have a lot of money, but she was a stable source of love and support throughout childhood and Britiny flourished in her care. Despite doctors’ concerns when she was born as a drug addicted child, Britiny was resilient and became a straight-A student who loved school from the beginning. Britiny’s grandmother was her rock even while struggling with the autoimmune disease lupus, which got worse as Britiny got older. When she was 8 years old her grandmother suffered a seizure when they were home alone together and Britiny had to call 911 and ride in the ambulance with her grandmother to the hospital. 

From then on she was terrified of losing her grandmother. Britiny’s mother Felicia, who had come in and out of her life throughout her childhood, was struggling towards sobriety. Nine months after Felicia became sober, when Britiny was 10 years old, her grandmother died. Felicia remembers the moving moment: “[My mother] held my hand and she told me, ‘Licia, I want to go home.’ And I thought that she meant go home, like put her in the car and take her home. No. She was saying she was tired and she was ready to go home to Glory... She looked at me in my eyes, and she said, ‘And God told me that you were ready, that you were ready to be a mom, that you’re going to be a good mom, that you’re not going to use drugs anymore, and that I could go.’” Britiny’s mother was finally ready to step in, regain custody, and learn how to be the parent her daughter needed and deserved. Today Britiny is a high school senior about to graduate from Cleveland’s John Hay School of Science and Medicine and dreams of becoming a cardiac surgeon. She recently received a Beat the Odds® scholarship from Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio. She says of her beloved grandmother, “She’s looking down on me. I’m sure she’s proud, and right now I just want to make her even more proud. I want to show her that she didn’t fight for me for nothing.”  

Britiny’s grandmother was one of the many caregivers raising children in “kinship care” or “GrandFamilies”—headed by grandparents or other relatives who step in when parents are unable to do so. Sometimes a child is removed from parents’ care by the state and placed with relatives in foster care; in other cases, children like Britiny are placed informally with relatives outside foster care. More than 6 million children are being raised in households headed by grandparents and other relatives. Of those 6 million, 2.5 million children are living in households without their parents present. These relative caregivers like Britiny’s grandmother are willing to care for the children, but often need financial or other help to appropriately meet their children’s needs.

A number of states have used subsidized guardianship programs to support kinship families and GrandFamilies. Kinship care has been found to help children maintain family, and oftentimes community, connections. There is also strong evidence that children placed in kinship care experience greater stability, have fewer behavioral problems, and are just as safe—if not safer—than children in non-relative care. In Britiny’s case, all of these positive outcomes came to pass, and after her grandmother “stepped up to the plate” a child who could easily have become a statistic is beating the odds and is a star with a bright future.

Stuck Outside the Poor Door

More than 88,000 people have applied to enter the “poor door” at a new luxury condominium tower on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Only one in 1,600 will win the lottery to live there. Some months ago a New York developer made headlines with the plans for this building, which takes advantage of zoning rules encouraging affordable housing by including some low-priced rental units along with the luxury condos for sale. A separate entrance for the people living in the low-income apartments continues with segregated living inside. Low-income tenants won’t be allowed to use the pool, gym, private theater, or any of the other amenities reserved for the wealthy owners. Critics immediately pounced on this design as a modern-day form of Jim Crow. But the need for affordable housing is so overwhelming that when the deadline came this month to participate in a lottery for the spots behind the “poor door” tens of thousands applied. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that most of the 219 luxury condos on the other side of the building have sold, some for more than $25 million.

The contrast between the haves and have-nots might be especially stark at that New York building, but millions of families across the country are finding themselves on the wrong side of the poor door. Housing is the single largest expense for most families and for far too many is growing increasingly out of reach. The number of families with worst-case housing needs increased from 6 million in 2007 to 8.5 million in 2011, including 3.2 million families with children, and the number of homeless public school students was 85 percent higher in 2012-2013 than before the recession.

Watch Ayriq's Story

Ayriq Sims has been one of those students. He and his siblings spent their childhood bouncing between unstable living arrangements, extended stays at relatives’ homes, and homeless shelters. Even when Ayriq’s family had somewhere to stay, he remembers all the times their lights and water were turned off, or when he went hungry because he’d made his younger siblings something to eat but there wasn’t enough food left for him to eat too. Through it all Ayriq stayed committed to excelling in school and winning an academic scholarship to The Ohio State University. But even this year, his senior year in high school and on his way to college, he found himself homeless again. Ayriq says: “I don’t want to be homeless again. I don’t want that to be who I am.”

The Children’s Defense Fund honored Ayriq with a scholarship for overcoming tremendous odds. Homelessness and housing instability can have serious, negative consequences on children’s emotional, cognitive, and physical development, academic achievement, and success as adults. Federal rental assistance, including public housing and vouchers for private rentals, helps about 5 million of the neediest low-income households afford a place to live. But because of funding limitations only about 1 in 4 needy families with children receives assistance. To add insult to injury, the Republican House and Senate budgets are proposing severe cuts to already inadequate and desperately needed housing subsidies. The White House estimates that compared to the President’s budget proposal, the Republican House budget would cut housing vouchers for 133,000 families and housing assistance for 20,000 rural families. This is on top of the 2013 sequestration cuts that led to 100,000 fewer families receiving assistance by June 2014.
 
In our Children’s Defense Fund report Ending Child Poverty Now we asked the nonprofit Urban Institute to study the impact of expanding the housing voucher program to better meet the huge need among poor and near-poor families with children who would have to pay more than half of their income to afford a fair market rent apartment. The Urban Institute found that providing enough subsidies to serve eligible families would reduce child poverty by 20.8 percent and lift 2.3 million children out of poverty — the largest impact among the nine policy improvements we proposed in our report. More than 2.5 million more households would receive a subsidy, worth an average of $9,435. We could easily pay for this housing subsidy expansion by making fairer and common sense reforms to close corporate accounting tax loopholes, saving $58 billion a year. Or if we had more responsible and more just members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, instead of repealing the estate tax which amounts to a $27 billion a year giveaway to the 5,400 ultra-wealthy estates worth over $5.4 million — in the top two-tenths of 1 percent — as the Senate and House both voted to do, we could invest the $24 billion a year needed to ensure poor and near-poor children a chance to grow up in a stable place to call home.

Instead of making extraordinary students like Ayriq struggle to beat the odds every day we should be taking common sense and essential steps like this to change the odds. The stories about the tens of thousands of people seeking entry in New York’s “poor door” are an urgent reminder of the need for more affordable housing across our country. Cutting back on already inadequate help to those most in need to give more tax welfare subsidies to those least in need is not the answer and is profoundly unjust. Families should not have to win a lottery to live in segregation just to get a roof over their heads.

Thank God for Peanut Butter and Jelly Day

Kaylyn Sigman is a high school senior with big plans. A star soccer player from a poor rural Appalachian Ohio community who loves calculus and creative writing, she's college-bound this fall and dreams of becoming a middle school special education teacher. Kaylyn's overcome a lot to arrive where she is today. Her parents' relationship was rocky throughout her childhood, and they finally divorced when she was 10, leaving Kaylyn's mother alone to raise her, her younger sister, and her two younger brothers, who were adopted. Her mother, who suffers from seizures, worked as a labor and delivery nurse but is now on disability. Both brothers have special mental health needs, and Kaylyn, a bright student who skipped second grade and was reading at the ninth-grade level in third grade, has ADHD, all leading to an ongoing pile of medical appointments and bills. After her father left, Kaylyn's family struggled in poverty, moving seven times in four years, trying to find an affordable place to stay. Kaylyn's mother says that when they lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) benefits last year, their family never would have survived the toughest times without PB and J Day, held once a week during the summer months at the children's school thanks to the local County Children's Services Agency. They'd come home with enough bread, peanut butter and jelly for each family member to have one sandwich for three meals a day until the next pickup.

Kaylyn is one of five inspiring high school seniors whom the Children's Defense Fund (Ohio) is honoring this month with a Beat the Odds^® award and college scholarship. But millions of other children continue to go hungry every day in our wealthy nation. Some aren't even lucky enough to be able to count on peanut butter sandwiches to get them through. What do those hungry families do?

SNAP helps feed 21 million children -- more than one in four children in our nation. SNAP prevents children and families from going hungry, improves overall health, and reduces poverty among families that benefit from it. The extra resources it provides lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty in 2013. It's the second most effective program for rescuing families from poverty, and the most effective program for rescuing families from deep poverty. SNAP doesn't just keep a child from going to school or bed hungry but has long-lasting effects. Research shows that children with access to food stamps are less likely to experience stunted growth, heart disease, and obesity by age 19 and are nearly 20-percent more likely to complete high school. And SNAP's positive effects extend beyond individual children and families to entire communities. During a recession, the impact of SNAP's economic growth is estimated to be from $1.73 to $1.79 for every dollar of benefits provided. In short, SNAP works. It's critical that SNAP be improved and expanded, not cut as proposed under the House and Senate Republican proposed budgets.

Although we know cuts to SNAP would mean millions of children might lose benefits and be more likely to go hungry and suffer the long-term negative impacts of hunger, and despite the fact that every major bipartisan budget commission has said that SNAP should not be cut, that's just what current Republican budget blueprints in the House and Senate are proposing. Worse, the House budget plan would block grant SNAP and cut its funding by $125 billion -- more than a third -- from 2021 to 2025. The Senate budget doesn't provide enough detail to tell exactly how SNAP would fare, but it cuts non-health entitlement programs serving low- and moderate-income people -- which includes SNAP -- by 24 percent.

SNAP benefits now average less than $1.40 a person a meal, and as critical as they are, they're not enough for many low-income families like Kaylyn's. In 2013, 54 percent of families receiving SNAP were still food-insecure, and overall one in nine children in our nation didn't have enough to eat. During the recession Congress recognized that SNAP benefits were too low for many and increased the value of the maximum benefit by 13.6 percent. The impact was powerful: Some 831,000 children were kept out of poverty in 2010 as a result of the change. But Congress ended that increase in November 2013. Further slashing SNAP benefits now will cause even more children to go hungry, push families deeper into poverty, and have negative repercussions for the entire nation.

There are many other choices. The Children's Defense Fund's recent Ending Child Poverty Now report shows that increasing SNAP benefits by 30 percent would decrease hunger for 12.6 million families with children, and that the added resources would lift 1.8 million children out of poverty, reducing child poverty by 16 percent. Families like Kaylyn's need more help, not less -- and it's not too late for our leaders on all sides of the political aisle to do the right thing. In a nation where millions of working families still can't earn enough to pay rent, pay the bills, and put food on the table at the same time -- and where in fiscal year 2013 there were 4.9 million households with no income but SNAP, including 1.3 million households with children -- relying on the charity of PB and J Day is not a substitute for justice. Tell these leaders seeking to make already hungry children hungrier that they should instead cut the $38 billion from the defense budget that the Pentagon did not ask for and restore the $269 billion in lost revenue from the repeal of the estate tax that only helps the wealthiest two tenths of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. It boggles my mind to try to understand such skewed moral values and lack of understanding that the real security of our nation is in the minds and bodies and education of our children.