Area poverty discussed
Published Wednesday, October 1, 2008
NATCHEZ — Twenty-seven percent of the Adams County population is living in poverty, and area residents want a solution sooner rather than later.
Reecy Dickson, chairwoman of the Mississippi House of Representatives Select Committee on Poverty, and Pete Walley, director of the Bureau for Long Range Economic Development and Planning came to Natchez as part of a statewide tour to discuss the issue.
Mississippi is the most impoverished state in the nation, with 21 percent of its population living in poverty.
“We’ve held that distinction for some time,” Walley said. “Unless we continue to attack this problem it’s going to be a continuing statistic.”
While many factors can contribute to poverty, lack of education and teenage pregnancy are the leading ones, Walley said.
Based on 2006 statistics Walley provided, 52.8 percent of children born in Mississippi are born to single mothers. In Adams County a whopping 65.9 percent of children are born to single mothers.
“The teen single mother is a double strike, and the research verifies that,” Walley said.
Alderman Joyce Mathis, who recently retired from the Natchez-Adams County School District agreed.
“You’ve got kids that come in (to the high school) pregnant and leave pregnant,” Mathis said. “And we’re not doing anything to address it. It’s a taboo subject.”
Many of the teenagers may have 4-year-old children before they even graduate from high school, but they never learn how to raise them, she said.
From 1995 to 2007, the percentage of births to teenage single mothers dropped from 39 percent to 27.9 percent, while the percent of births to single mothers as a whole rose from 45.3 percent to 53.7 percent.
“We’ve always had out-of-wedlock children,” Mathis said. “This didn’t just happen. It just got popular because of Hollywood and hip-hop.”
And it will take more than abstinence education to fix this problem, Gwen Ball said to the legislators in attendance. Students need to be taught about how to prevent pregnancy.
“I would suggest we have a full blown sex education class,” she said.
Much of the poverty issue also hangs on education, Walley said. According to his statistics, 40.5 percent of students who enrolled in ninth grade in 2002 statewide did not graduate four years later.
“And then to add insult to injury, 26,000 kids enrolled (in 12th grade in 2005) and 23,722 graduated,” Walley said.
But Alderman Tony Fields said that this issue begins much early than high school.
“I’ve said it before and one of these days I’m going to get an Amen on it — we need to focus on early childhood development,” he said. “We had something very different in our schools (when I was in school). I had a connection with my teachers and principals. I feared them.”
Other issues were discussed, including race, abuse, jobs and housing, but everyone agreed that something has to change.