Two big stories on rural schools, poverty, housing, and drugs

EdSource recently published this story out of Oroville, California (population 15,000, and county seat of Butte County, California) and the New York Times yesterday published this story out of Minford, Ohio, (population 693).  

The EdSource headline is "Lost days: Poverty, isolation drive students away from school in California’s rural districts:  The state's highest rates of chronic absenteeism are in rural areas."  The story is about chronic absenteeism, a term used to refer to students who miss at least 10% of school days.  About 11% of California students--some 700K in all--are chronically absent, and about 10% of the state's 1000 districts had rates of chronic absenteeism as high as Oroville's.  Here are some data points:

• Of the 98 districts with rates higher than 20 percent, 84 were in rural areas.
• Of the 27 districts with rates higher than 30 percent, 26 were in rural areas.
• Of the 40 counties where rates were above the statewide average, 30 are rural as identified by Rural County Representatives of California, a statewide group.

The story does not, however, define "rural," and Oroville is not "rural" by the U.S. Census Bureau definition. Nor is Butte County, with a population of 220,000, "nonmetropolitan" by the Office of Management and Budget standard.

The story's lede personalizes the data.  It features Kaylee Adkins, now 20: 

The daughter of two heavy drug users, [Kaylee] lived a transient childhood — rarely staying for long in the same apartment, let alone the same school. She hardly saw her father who was in jail or prison throughout much of her childhood.

* * * 

When Kaylee, now 20, was in grade school, her mother’s pattern was to stay in a place until the eviction notice came, then run. Sometimes it would be to another part of Oroville, a rural town of about 15,000 people in Northern California’s Butte County where her family was from. Other times it would be out of state to small towns in Texas or West Virginia.

As you can see, the story is not only about absenteeism.  It is about the constellation of social problems that contribute to it, including poverty, drugs, housing challenges, and sheer distance.  Indeed, perhaps because I'm researching rural housing--really the rural housing crisis--right now, eviction looms large for me in this story.

But the story is also about "family commitments."  You see, Kaylee's parents both died when she was in high school, so she wound up living with a niece after that.  But when her niece had children, Kaylee was expected to miss school to care for them.  So Kaylee wound up missing about a third of the days of her senior year of high school--even though she was living just a few blocks from the school in Oroville.

Interestingly, the other story from EdSource that I've blogged about also featured Oroville.   That story was about high rates of school suspensions in rural schools, framed as the school-to-prison pipeline.  And I as I wrote there, one reason for that high rate of suspensions is likely a lack of resources because smaller school districts can't achieve economies of scale.  So I was pleased to see that this story on chronic absenteeism quotes an expert who acknowledges that rural challenge problem.

[I]n rural areas they have the fewest resources and the least access to the newest information about how to combat this.

The second story, the one by the New York Times out of southern Ohio, focuses on younger children.  The headline is "Inside the Elementary School Where Drug Addiction Sets the Curriculum."  About half of the students in the featured elementary school have experienced drug abuse at home.  As with the California story, the journalist (here Dan Levin), leads with a student who illustrates the phenomenon:   

Inside an elementary school classroom decorated with colorful floor mats, art supplies and building blocks, a little boy named Riley talked quietly with a teacher about how he had watched his mother take “knockout pills” and had seen his father shoot up “a thousand times.” 

Riley, who is 9 years old, described how he had often been left alone to care for his baby brother while his parents were somewhere else getting high. Beginning when he was about 5, he would heat up meals of fries, chicken nuggets and spaghetti rings in the microwave for himself and his brother, he said. “That was all I knew how to make,” Riley said. 

Riley — who is in foster care and who officials asked not be fully identified because of his age — is among hundreds of students enrolled in the local school district who have witnessed drug use at home. Like many of his classmates at Minford Elementary School, Riley struggles with behavioral and psychological problems that make it difficult to focus, school officials said, let alone absorb lessons.

Levin details the Minford program, funded with $550 million in "student wellness funds" from the State of Ohio. 

Minford is in Scioto County, population 79,499,  "long considered ground zero in Ohio's opioid epidemic."  Some 9.7 million pills were prescribed here in 2010, "enough to give 123 to each resident."   The poverty rate in Scioto County is 23.9%.   When I "Googled" Scioto County, Ohio, the top "hits" were news stories about abused children and drug arrests.  Oh, and there was a story about the state reviewing 2700 cases decided by a recently retired Scioto County judge accused of alcoholism.