Shannon NickinsonHow do we make a difference in a child’s future?
One answer comes from a study released in June by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Over nearly 30 years they studied about 800 kids from first grade until their late 20s.
Kids whose parents were married and working fared better. Most kids from single-parent families did not rise far above where they began in life, according to NPR’s story about the study.
That is a particularly tough truth to take, especially for Escambia County, where 43.2 percent of our families are headed by single parents.
In a recent constituent video message, Escambia County Commissioner Lumon May highlighted a pilot summer program at Wedgewood Community Center that aimed to give kids a constructive, safe place to go for the summer.
Tre Bonner, one of the counselors at the Wedgewood camp, said there were close to 150 kids at the camp on most days. Attendance, he said, grew by word of mouth.
“You change lives by building the foundation up,” Bonner said. “Every kid’s parents can’t afford to pay the $160 a week (for summer enrichment camp). They’re trying, but they just can’t. To take these kids on and say you are going to do it (free of charge), it’s just tremendous.”
If many of those single-parent households are headed by women, the average earning power of those women is lower than that of men in the local workforce.
Women make up 48.5 percent of the Pensacola metro area’s workforce. (That includes Escambia and Santa Rosa counties.) That’s about 92,291 women who are working, according to the American Community Survey done by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Those women make on average $32,529 a year. The average male worker in our area makes $42,922 a year, in case you were curious. The largest number of our working women — 34,253 — work in sales and service-related jobs, with an average salary of $28,593 a year.
This struggle is reflected, too in the findings of the recent Quality of Life survey, conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research for the Pensacola Young Professionals.
That survey found that people think Escambia County is a good place for retirees to live.
If you are poor, or if you are a family with young children, well, not so much. Only 17 percent of folks thought this was a good place to live if you were poor; only 36 percent thought it was a good place for families with young children.
That puts a lot of our kids up against long odds for success.
But the growth of our community depends on bringing as many of those kids along as we can. Until the wage level rises, until the educational attainment of a child is less dependent on the neighborhood he lives in, we will remain a sleepy seaside community that is a great place to live for some folks.
We have the chance to determine what the price of our piece of paradise is. We can choose to invest in educating young children to better prepare them for the world they will face. We can choose to pay our workers wages that don’t keep pace with our peer communities. And we can remain a quiet little town with a big intergenerational poverty problem that keeps too many of our sons and daughters on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
Shannon Nickinson is the editor of www.progresspromise.com, a news and analysis website in Pensacola. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
