The U.S. Cen­sus Bureau recently released sta­tis­tics that mea­sured poverty for the nation’s school dis­tricts. For the state of Ore­gon, the cen­sus fig­ures show that rural areas of the state have the high­est lev­els of poor chil­dren. Mean­while, the Port­land metro area and other towns had lower lev­els of the poor.

From The Ore­gon­ian, writer Betsy Ham­mond breaks down the num­bers. Ore­gon Live also has this file that lists poverty lev­els for all of Oregon’s schools.

Statewide, the low­est rates are in Lake Oswego, Sher­wood, Cor­bett and West Linn-Wilsonville. Six per­cent or fewer of school-age chil­dren in those dis­tricts live in house­holds below the poverty level, the bureau reported this month.

On the flip side are Wood­burn, nearly every school dis­trict in south­east Oregon’s Har­ney County, the Pow­ers school dis­trict in south­west Ore­gon and the Three Rivers school dis­trict around Grants Pass. One-quarter to one-third of all school-age chil­dren in those areas live below the poverty line, defined as income of $22,050 a year for a fam­ily of four.

Schools face a much greater chal­lenge get­ting stu­dents to read and do math at grade level in high-poverty com­mu­ni­ties. A fed­eral report released last week showed that a stu­dent who attends a school serv­ing mainly low-income and working-class stu­dents is about 12 times more likely to attend a chron­i­cally low-performing school than a stu­dent whose school serves mostly mod­er­ate– or high-income students.

“When­ever you are deal­ing with stu­dents at risk, you have issues,” said Peter Maluk, direc­tor of fed­eral pro­grams for the Three Rivers dis­trict. “We see more and more needy fam­i­lies, and we need to be sen­si­tive to help­ing them and giv­ing their kids a solid education.”

Maluk’s dis­trict won com­pet­i­tive fed­eral grants to help serve home­less stu­dents and to offer after-school aca­d­e­mic and enrich­ment pro­grams. He said he is proud of the results Three Rivers has achieved teach­ing low-income students.

When schools do a good job, they can be the best place for chil­dren from poor fam­i­lies, said Holly Pruett, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Stand for Chil­dren in Oregon.

“For chil­dren liv­ing in poverty, schools are the essen­tial life­line to the skills and the inspi­ra­tion to be able to suc­ceed in life,” she said.

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