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They’ve learned a lot about poverty: The federal government defines it as a single person earning less than $9,570 a year or two earning less than $12,830. Minimum wage is $6.50, which, times 40 hours a week times 52 weeks a year, lands you just above $13,000. The highest-poverty state is Mississippi, the lowest is New Hampshire.
They learned local statistics, too: Their school’s neighborhood has among the higher rates of poverty in the city, at more than 45 percent. Their school’s rate hovers over 50 percent. What they’ve studied in class, they can see in classmates and people who surround them in the neighborhood.
The sobering numbers about poverty among them led to a food drive during the last week of school that collected 87 cans of food for the school’s pantry, called the Cougar Cabinet. It’s open to students and local people from the community who need food and basic living supplies.
The seventh-graders, part of a “pod” of about 75 students who focus on media studies, organized a food drive to collect the cans. During the last week of school, they went on the public address system every day, educating their peers about how close to home poverty is and urging them to donate food.
Grace Heglund-Lohman said she closed her address with a quote from former British prime minister Winston Churchill: “We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give.”
The students, who publish a school newspaper periodically and produce television broadcasts on Fridays, have become so media savvy that one of them, seventh-grader Dylan Smith, has created a media pseudonym: Dylan Coolidge.
“Smith’s too common,” he explained with a smile.
Dan Simmons can be reached at (608)791-8217 or dsimmons@lacrossetribune.com.
