Stimulus money helps homeless schoolchildren

Stimulus money helps homeless schoolchildren
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By Lauren E. Bohn and Chika Oduah | McClatchy Newspapers



ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. — Downtown Rocky Mount in eastern North Carolina offers a horizon of shuttered businesses, along with a stretch of houses with boarded-up windows and vacant porches.

Forbes magazine now ranks Rocky Mount, once a vibrant manufacturing hub, as one of the 10 most impoverished cities in America, with an unemployment rate hovering at a dismal 13 percent and a county crime rate that's almost double the national average.

The area's woes have contributed to another number that's rising: homelessness among children.

The Nash-Rocky Mount Public Schools system had at least 564 homeless students for the 2009-10 school year, up 9 percent from last year. North Carolina ranks as the ninth worst state in the country for the risk of child homelessness, with a 48 percent increase in homeless youth from 2006.

About $70 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus bill, is to bolster a federal program aimed at helping homeless children. The money will assist cash-strapped school districts in complying with the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a federal mandate to help remove some of the obstacles that prevent homeless students from attending school.

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/08/08/98564/stimulus-money-helps-homeless.html

escaping its natural home in the pockets of the rich and frittering itself away on the lazy poor.