Welcome to Current Events!
We are excited to bring you engaging content to boost students' reading skills and supplement your curriculum.
Here's where we post story updates, additional resources, including Smart Stuff quizzes the Friday before your Monday issue date. Be sure to check back each issue. And encourage your students to read and post to CE’s News Blog.
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Issue 10 News Updates
Poor in America
In issue 10 of Current Events, students learned about an a rise in the U.S. poverty rate. Share this news update with your students.
The poverty rate in the United States, of course, is different in different parts of the country. According to a November 8 interview of Mark Rank, the lead author of a poverty study by Washington University in St. Louis, by the Brownsville Herald in Texas, nearly 90 percent of all children living along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas will be on food stamps at some time before they reach adulthood.
This figure, along with other figures measuring poverty and hunger, are growing, Rank said. "It's a real wake-up call to America," Rank told reporters. "Children in the United States have higher levels of poverty than in other industrial nations. This is an issue we have not been paying nearly enough attention to."
In wealthier communities, such as Morris County, New Jersey, the rate of poverty in this recession may be hidden, but it is also surprisingly high. A study reported on in Morristown, N.J.Õs Daily Record, found that the working poor form one-quarter of the population of Morris county, where the median income in 2007 was $94,684 and the average price of a new home last summer was $695,525, more than five times the average price for a new home in the United States as a whole.
Encourage your students to share their views about the news on CENewsBlog.com.