Published: September 27, 2008 06:07 pm         

MARK BENNETT: Need proof of the struggling economy’s impact on the Valley?

Nearly 50 percent of Vigo County students now receive free or reduced meals and textbooks.

TERRE HAUTE — Locust Street is a long way from Wall Street.

The troubles in that New York financial district so tightly gripped America last week that President Bush used the word “panic.” He pleaded with an adversarial Congress to accept his $700-billion plan to rescue teetering investment and lending titans. He even compromised.

You know things are dire when Republicans and Democrats in Washington work fast, and together.

They were trying to avert “a long, painful recession,” Bush said.

Terre Haute began feeling the pain long before last week. The calls to the Catholic Charities food bank at 1356 Locust St. have increased this year, swelling after disastrous June floods, layoffs and plant closings. Every day, more than 100 children turn to the nonprofit agency for their evening meal. “And they wouldn’t get any meal otherwise,” said Pat Etling, director of the food bank.

The requests for help are growing.

“People are in dire, dire situations,” she added. “People are losing their homes, can’t pay their bills, and they can’t eat their cars.”

As the economy worsens, the community’s ability to respond with donations lessens, too.

Etling can’t recall a grimmer stretch locally. “Not to the extent it is now, no. Heavens no,” she said.

Economists and government analysts look for statistical evidence of a recession — things like real gross domestic product rates, jobless rates, soaring or tanking prices, sales, and manufacturing output. They avoid using the R-word like baseball players who won’t utter the phrase “no-hitter” until their pitcher’s recorded the last out. No reason to jinx or scare anybody.

Fifty percent of the students in the Vigo County School Corp. received free or reduced meals and textbooks by the end of the 2007-08 school year. As of Wednesday, 7,592 children are on that assistance plan, an increase of 235 over the same date last year. “As more come in, we will get closer [to 50 percent] and probably surpass it by the end of the year,” said Donna Mahan, the corporation’s supervisor of food service.

That’s more than half the county’s student population.

In 1999-2000, as this decade began, just 35 percent of kids in the corporation received free or reduced meals and books.

“People don’t realize how poor Terre Haute really is,” Mahan said.

“To work in this office and hear the stories,” she added, “it just breaks your heart.”

Federal guidelines determine whether a family qualifies for meal assistance. A family of four, for example, must earn $39,220 or less to qualify for reduced-price student meals, or $27,560 for free meals. “The ones that just barely miss are the ones that just break my heart most,” Mahan said.

The percentages vary among Vigo County’s 18 elementary schools, six middle schools and five high schools. Some are as low as 14 percent. Some hit 90 percent. The state average is 40 percent.

Service organizations and charities step up with donations for a variety of needs, from after-school supervision and meals to shoes and clothes, said Karen Goeller, the VCSC deputy superintendent. The corporation sought and received grants for extended-day learning for students who need extra class time. Curriculum has been made consistent among the schools, because economically strapped families move residences more often, causing those kids to switch schools, Goeller explained. School staffers, from principals to cafeteria cooks, try to find ways to help, even telephoning homes with wake-up calls, Mahan added.

As she discussed the numbers and remedies last week, Goeller brought a book called “Sixteen Trends: Their Profound Impact on Our Future.” That not-so-sweet 16 list — by Gary Marx, president of the Center for Public Outreach in Virginia — included “sustained poverty.” Its implications, Marx wrote, are “glaring,” from lost talent and productivity, to frustration, increased welfare, violence, mental health issues, and packed jails and homeless shelters, among other things.

Some of those implications already have shown up in Vigo County, where the child poverty rate is third-highest in the state, and where median household incomes are more than $7,000 below the state average.

The bailout plan in Washington has implications for folks here and elsewhere, the president said, warning that without it Americans could see retirement savings wiped out, foreclosures, job losses and plant closings. If this lifeline to the U.S. financial industry succeeds, Bush, the next president and the next Congress need to remember people in towns like Terre Haute who endured those painful experiences well before Wall Street and the White House acknowledged this crisis.

Those folks deserve the same sense of urgency.



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.