Wince of the Week, July 21-28, 2012
The EHRP Team winced hard when we read this in Jim Ware’s July 25 article for Star News online:
Terjera Wright was in line for free groceries Wednesday morning, standing in 90-degree heat with her 10-year-old stepson Millian Wright outside the First Fruit Ministries food pantry on Vance Street.
Wright, 23, of Wilmington said she works as a nurse’s aide and medical technician at a nursing home, but makes only about $7,000 a year. Her husband Marcus Wright said he has been laid off twice this year – once from the city’s solid waste division and, most recently, from a Wendy’s restaurant.
Millian is among the 565,000 children younger than 18 who lived in low-income working families in North Carolina in 2010, according to statistics released Wednesday by Kids Count, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation to track the well-being of children in the United States.
Kids Count also shows that 554,191 children were living in poverty in 2010 in North Carolina, the latest year for which statistics were available. That’s up 19 percent from 2005. New Hanover County had 9,246 children living in poverty in 2010, up 43.7 percent from 2005. Brunswick had 5,188, up 22.3 percent; and Pender had 2,950, up 21 percent. Nationally, 22 percent of children were living in poverty in 2010, also up 19 percent from 2005.
– An excerpt from Jim Ware’s July 25 article for Star News Online, More Children Living in Poverty
