From 1960s “urban renewal” to 1980s crack dens and, most recently, the demolition of much of Detroit after it lost two-thirds of its residents, the scope of inner-city American poverty is clear. But we do not yet fully grasp the challenges facing today’s rural communities – what it’s like to live in small towns, and their residents’ difficulty with finding stable, sustaining employment. As part of its series of articles marking the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, The New York Times offered an intimate peek into the combination of rampant unemployment, hunger, drug and alcohol addiction, high incarceration rates, and lack of educational opportunities that plagues places of concentrated rural poverty like McDowell County, West Virginia.
The Sundance award-winning documentary Rich Hill, which just opened in theaters across the country, provides a perhaps more nuanced look. Tracking a year in the lives of three youth in a small Missouri town, the film illuminates the challenges that rural poverty, in particular, pose to children’s odds of school success. Only one of the three boys lives with two parents, neither of whom is regularly employed. Appachey lives with a single mother who has been working minimum-wage jobs since having her first child as a teenager, and Harley lives with his grandmother, who is standing in while his mother is in prison. Healthy food is scarce, two of the boys smoke cigarettes constantly, and only one of the three homes offers a quiet space conducive to studying. All three teens live in circumstances that threaten their mental and emotional well-being, and their school is ill-equipped to address these myriad challenges.
[For more of this story, written by Thomas Brewster and Elaine Weiss, go to http://billmoyers.com/2014/08/...s-resource-mismatch/]
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