The U.S. Cen­sus Bureau has released poverty sta­tis­tics for school dis­tricts across the coun­try. We found a cou­ple of sto­ries that focus of the num­bers for two dif­fer­ent regions; Tal­la­has­see, Florida and Red­ding, Cal­i­for­nia.

First from Tal­la­has­see Demo­c­rat, writer Iricka Berlinger gives the sta­tis­tics and a sum­mary of the Cen­sus Bureau methodology.

The U.S. Cen­sus Bureau recently released the poverty esti­mates of school dis­tricts around the coun­try. The Cen­sus Bureau uses a set equa­tion that plugs in num­bers of fam­ily size and income to deter­mine who is in poverty. If a family’s total income is less than the family’s thresh­old, then that fam­ily and every indi­vid­ual in it is con­sid­ered in poverty.

The Cen­sus Bureau reported that state aver­age of chil­dren ages 5 to 17 liv­ing in poverty in 2008 was 16.7 per­cent. In Leon County Schools, 5,896 out of the 37,807 stu­dents live in poverty; 15.5 per­cent of stu­dents. In Wakulla County, 15.6 per­cent; Jef­fer­son County, 20.7 per­cent; Franklin County, 27.7 per­cent; and Gads­den County, 29.2 per­cent of students.

The num­bers have grown by about 2 per­cent more stu­dents since 2007 and are only likely to increase more with the decline of the economy.

Shaia Beckwith-James, spokesman for Gads­den County Schools, said she wasn’t sur­prised to hear that Gads­den County has one of the high­est rates of poverty in the state.

“It’s evi­dent that we have stu­dents that come to us and have to deal with a lot of life chal­lenges,” she said. “But we don’t want them to make excuses. Every stu­dent that comes to school is going to be given the chance to succeed.”

Now from California’s Record Search­light, writer Amanda Win­ters breaks down the data for the Red­ding area.

“There’s not a lot of employ­ment here,” said Merle Stolz, super­in­ten­dent of Indian Springs School Dis­trict, where the Cen­sus Bureau esti­mates 31 per­cent of chil­dren live in poverty.

Stolz said the Big Bend school’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the free and reduced-price lunch pro­gram is near 100 per­cent. Dur­ing the 2008–2009 school year, 11 of the school’s 14 stu­dents were enrolled in the program.

But the high­est esti­mated per­cent­age of chil­dren liv­ing in poverty in Shasta County is in the Cas­cade Union Ele­men­tary School Dis­trict in Ander­son, accord­ing to the data. The dis­trict has a child poverty rate of 34 per­cent, but close to 83 per­cent of the district’s esti­mated 1,400 chil­dren receive dis­counted meals.

That’s a 5 per­cent increase over last year, said Debby Andrew, the district’s direc­tor of child nutrition.

“There are kids that can’t afford to have food,” Andrew said. “I’ve had par­ents call me and say they don’t have the money to send kids to school with their meals.”

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