By Matthew E. Milliken

mmilliken@heraldsun.com; 419-6684

DURHAM -- Before Kristy Moore became president of the Durham Association of Educators, she spent six years teaching preschool and first grade at Glenn Elementary School. It has one of the most impoverished student populations in the district; in 2009-10, nearly 94 percent of its youngsters qualified for free or reduced-price lunch.

Moore saw that poverty firsthand.

"I ... personally when I was in a classroom have purchased children clothes," she recalled. "Or if they came to school dirty on a constant basis, I would provide them washcloths and soaps [so they] could go into the bathroom and bathe themselves if they would like to -- and have an extra pair of clothes at school so they change into [them] and I could wash their clothes for them."

Serious poverty is hardly confined to that one school. A few years ago, community activist Theresa El-Amin heard a local judge tell the Superintendent's Task Force on Closing the Achievement Gap some obstacles that prevent children from attending class. "He was naming things like underwear and toothpaste," El-Amin recalled. "And I was like, what does that have to do with people coming to school? He said you would be amazed at the poverty reasons that people don't come to school. And he started talking about things -- I mean really basic things -- toiletries and things that students don't have, which is why they don't come to school."

It's hard to hold an in-depth conversation about the Durham public school system without bringing poverty into the equation. According to state data, in 2008-09, 53 percent of the district's children were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a commonly accepted measure of poverty in schools. Among the 10 largest North Carolina school districts, only Cumberland and Gaston had higher rates (55 percent and 54 percent, respectively).

Kisha Daniels is an education professor at N.C. Central University. A former longtime Durham Public Schools employee whose duties included coordinating Title I programs for impoverished students, Daniels has three children who attend George Watts Elementary School. She's involved in the district in other ways, too, serving on the team that recently won a five-year grant to improve the academic performance of Durham's black male students.

"Poverty is so devastating to so many people," Daniels said. "And it just clearly makes it harder to learn and to do the things that are easy for everyone else if you live in poverty."

Daniels' research has shown her that Durham is below the national average on measures of poverty. But when she looked at other areas around the state, she found Durham had atypically high poverty and atypically low food security.

"And food security is huge because yes, we do have a school breakfast-lunch program, but children are still hungry," Daniels said. "And if you're hungry, you can't think about ABCs, 123s."

By many measures, Durham is not the poorest of the state's urban counties. (The 10 largest counties contain the 10 largest school districts.) Although about a quarter of Durham residents under the age of 18 live in poverty, census data showed six of the other top-10 counties having higher proportions of young poor residents in 2007. (However, in 2006, with a marginally higher percentage of impoverished youngsters, Durham ranked third among peers.) Among its peers, Durham consistently boasts the third- or fourth-highest median household and per capita income for all residents, for non-Hispanic whites, for African-Americans and for multiracial residents.

But there's no question that Durham does have significant poverty. And it certainly seems to have a big impact on the schools.

Alex Quigley is the principal of Maureen Joy Charter School. Four-fifths of his students are eligible for the free and reduced-price lunch program, marking them as impoverished.

"Kids growing up in poverty face a host of other challenges that kids growing up in more stable middle- and upper-income homes don't have to face," he said. "Everything from their parents work a night shift and their brother is the one putting them to bed at night to transportation. Going to the pool in the hot summer or doing something that's active or whatever is harder because maybe you have to take the bus, so you sit inside and you play video games instead."

Quigley also pointed to a phenomenon in which students forget important lessons over the summer break.

"We have what amounts to 25 percent summer loss problem at this school, where the kids lose about 25 percent of what they've learned when they get back here in the fall," the principal said. "You're basically playing catch-up in the beginning, and that's fairly common among traditional calendared schools [with two-month-long summer breaks] with kids who are low-income."

Bud Lavery, the head of local education organization Communities in Schools in Durham, believes that summer loss is a major difference between children in low-income and high-income families. Because research shows that better-off children tend to continue learning over the break, some say that summer loss is a major contributor to disparities in test scores.

Poverty is also associated with a phenomenon educators call mobility. "We're finding that as families lose income earners, oftentimes that equates to a move from a house to an apartment, or from apartment to apartment, perhaps," said Lewis Ferebee, the Durham school district's new chief of staff. "You have parents of school-age children that are now moving in with grandparents and other older adults."

Such movement, which frequently requires a change in schools, can affect learning. "In general, it has more of an impact in the lower grades," Ferebee said. "It has more of an impact if a student is moving in the middle of the year on a consistent basis. Typically, if a child can finish the year with the same teacher, it's better results. And ultimately, if a child can complete a series of years in the same school, that's probably the optimal situation."

For now and for the foreseeable future, however, it's likely that Ferebee and other Durham educators will have to deal with circumstances that are far from optimal. Tuesday's article will examine other challenges that, like poverty, pose challenges in educating students.