Galesburg Register-Mail
May 5, 2010
Heartland Alliance’s Social Impact Research Center released news for Illinois through its 2010 Report on Poverty.
From Galesburg Register-Mail:
Heartland Alliance’s Social Impact Research Center released some bad news for Illinois in the form of the 2010 Report on Poverty.
And the news for Knox County — released Tuesday on www.stage.heartlandalliance.org/povertyreport — wasn’t any better.
According to Amy Terpstra, associate director of the research center, Knox County was one of 29 counties placed on Heatland Alliance’s “Poverty Warning List” for 2010. The county was on the “Poverty Watch List” — ranking above the warning list — in 2009.
“Counties on the warning list fared very poorly in two areas: the high school graduation rate and the teen pregnancy rate,” Terpstra said. “Those are indicators of the poverty in the future. The main indicators we used to gauge present poverty was the unemployment rate and poverty rate.”
Knox County’s teen birth rate of 41 per 1,000 residents ranks just ahead of the state average of 42 per 1,000. The county’s graduation rate of 76 percent ranked below the average of 80 percent.
Knox County’s poverty rate is 16.5 percent. The unemployment rate reached 12.9 percent in January and dropped to 11.7 in March. Both are above the state averages in each category.
While Knox County has slipped from the watch list to the warning list, the Social Impact Research Center issued some more dire warnings about the lives of the state’s poorest residents. In a news release issued Tuesday, the center’s researchers said Illinois’ poorest residents — those who had the least to start with before the recession — were hit first and hardest by the economic downturn and will recover the slowest. According to the release “workers in the lowest income group in Illinois had a 1930s-like unemployment rate of 27 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 while Illinois’ overall unemployment rate was 10 percent.”
According to the 2010 Report on Poverty, more than 1.5 million Illinoisans — 12.2 percent of the state’s population — were living in poverty in 2008. An additional 16.2 percent — more than two million people — were on shaky financial ground with incomes between the poverty line and twice the poverty line.
“The goal of the poverty report is to educate people,” Terpstra said. “And we hope we will show some policy opportunities. Really, the report shows that we need to be thinking about the folks at the bottom as we work to build an economic recovery in this state.
“Social services are in danger of taking the hardest hit, in terms of the Illinois budget. If that happens, we will be hitting people the hardest when they need social services the most.”