Where’s the Suburban Safety Net for Students in Poverty?

Collaborations of school districts in South Seattle and elsewhere help shore up service and capacity gaps to meet rising needs

To the south of Seattle lies the Auburn School District — a suburban system in King County, Wash., that serves about 15,000 students who have seen a steep increase in economic hardship.

The number of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches has increased by 58 percent since the middle of the last decade. By the 2013-14 school year, 56 percent of the student population was eligible for subsidized meals.

Auburn’s experience is not unique in South King County. A similar story can be told in the nearby districts of Federal Way, Highline, Kent, Renton and Tukwila, all of which experienced significant increases in the number of low-income students in recent years. Each of these districts now has the majority of their students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.

Similarly, the low-income student population has grown in suburban districts across the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. During the latter half of the 2000s alone, the number of students in suburban districts on free or reduced-price lunch ticked up by 22 percent, compared to an increase of just 8 percent in large urban districts.

Missing Infrastructure

The growing presence of economically disadvantaged students in suburban schools has occurred amid a striking and historic shift in the location of poverty in the United States. In the 2000s, suburbs became home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the nation. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of suburban residents living below the federal poverty line ($24,230 for a family of four in 2014) grew more than twice as fast as in big cities (65 percent versus 29 percent, respectively). Although the poverty rate remains higher in big cities (20.9 percent) than in suburbs (11.8 percent) on average, the total number of poor people in suburbs now outstrips the urban poor population by 3.4 million.

Several factors have propelled the rapid rise of poverty taking place in the nation’s suburbs. More poor residents have moved to suburban communities, partly due to shifts in the location of affordable housing and the continued suburbanization of jobs. And more suburban residents have fallen into poverty over time, given two economic downturns in the 2000s — both followed by uneven recoveries that failed to reach down the economic ladder — and the growing prevalence of low-wage work.

While poverty poses significant challenges to low-income students and schools in cities and suburbs alike, the fact that suburbs often are ill-equipped to deal with those challenges can make them that much harder to overcome. Many suburbs lack the infrastructure and safety net supports large cities have developed over the course of decades to address the needs of low-income residents and families. Public transit options often are limited or nonexistent in the suburbs, and suburban social safety net services tend to be patchier and less-resourced than those offered in urban centers, which can make it difficult for the growing number of low-income students and their families to access important support services.

A Collective Impact

The fragmented jurisdictional landscape that makes up American suburbia raises additional challenges for communities grappling with increasing need. Individual suburban municipalities and school districts often lack the necessary scale, capacity and resources to effectively address the challenges of poverty on their own.

Amid these challenges, suburban schools and districts around the country have increasingly stepped in to help shore up service and capacity gaps to meet the rising need in their communities. To do so, they are finding innovative ways to collaborate across institutions, sectors and jurisdictions to tackle shared challenges and make limited resources stretch further to improve outcomes for their students.

In South King County, the six suburban school districts have joined together with schools in South Seattle to form the Road Map Project. Using a collective impact approach that brings together school districts, local nonprofits, public housing authorities and other community partners and stakeholders, the Road Map Project is working to close achievement gaps and improve educational outcomes for students in the region.

Road Map Project partners track their progress through a series of agreed-upon benchmarks and metrics and use dedicated work groups to identify promising strategies, help assess performance, and inform any necessary course corrections. One issue identified by the partners was the disruption of residential moves low-income families frequently have to make, which can take them across jurisdictional boundaries and school districts.

In addition to negative consequences for students, midterm moves across a fragmented suburban landscape can complicate the ability to coordinate across institutions and with nearby housing authorities, nonprofit service providers and other stakeholders to keep students and families connected to educational and wraparound supports.

In response, the Road Map Project used funds from the $40 million Race to the Top award it won in 2012 to develop a regional student data transfer system and to provide support services across all seven districts.

Inter-Agency Partners

In other regions across the country, where schools are often among the first to see the impact of growing need and lagging resources or the absence of key safety net supports, schools and districts are finding ways to help bridge that gap. Like the districts in King County, Wash., they are partnering with nonprofits, government agencies and others to bring much-needed services to their school buildings and campuses.

To do so, a growing number of suburban schools and districts are adopting the community schools model, which promotes partnerships and community engagements that integrate education, health and social services, and youth and community development to improve outcomes for students and their families and communities.

Started in 1991 in Montgomery County, Md. — a suburban county adjacent to Washington, D.C. — Linkages to Learning is a community school partnership that now serves more than 5,400 individuals at 29 schools with large low-income populations. More than 3,700 of those students receive comprehensive behavioral health or wraparound social services to reduce nonacademic barriers to learning.

Similarly, in Grand Rapids, Mich., and its surrounding suburbs, the Kent School Services Network serves 30 schools across nine school districts. Through the partnership, each participating school has on-site staff to address the needs of low-income students. Staff support can include coordinators to connect families to needed services, clinicians to provide counseling and other direct services, and nurses or health aides to provide medical services to students and their families.

These are just two examples of community schools partnerships that are bringing needed resources to suburban communities that have seen economic needs grow rapidly in recent years.

New Realities

Popular stereotypes of American suburbia aside, poverty is now a suburban reality. Looking forward, as suburbs continue to struggle with the challenges of poverty alongside cities, overcoming the resource and capacity gaps in suburbs will require more scaled and integrated solutions that can work across jurisdictional boundaries and policy silos.

While more resources are needed to meet the increased scope and reach of today’s needs, collaborative models like those in King County and other places demonstrate the critical role schools and districts can play in helping to stretch limited resources and use them more effectively to improve outcomes for low-income children.