Petula Dvorak - The grinding reality of growing up poor: When kids are poor, they are little adults, weighed down by a world of no.
And I'm not talking, 'No, you can't have a new Spider-Man backpack,' or, 'No more princess shoes for you.'
The no of poverty in kids' lives today means no new clothes, no bed, no sleeping past 5 a.m. or we won't have time to take three buses to get to your school, no telling the guard at the Metro station that we're sleeping there tonight, no after-school tutoring program designed just for you, because, the truth is, we can't afford to get you there and back every day.
This is the daily reality for thousands of our children, especially African American children growing up in the District.
We found out this week that three out of 10 children in the nation's capital were living in poverty last year. Thousands more were on the edge of poverty, which is defined as an income of $22,000 for a family of four, according to census figures. And the ranks of the desperate and near-desperate were growing in the suburbs as well.
In the District, there were about 7,000 more black children living in poverty last year than there were two years before. That's more than a third of the seating at Verizon Center.
