Poverty

For the first time, San Fernando High School is eligible for a special federal grant given schools with a large number of low-income students, despite its late application, Los Angeles Unified School District officials said Wednesday. The amount is yet to be determined but is expected to be about $500,000, school officials said. The issue now is how to divide the federal funding among the more than 400 eligible Los Angeles schools, said Terri Minami, who oversees allocation of the funds.

Hit by the first wave of federal budget cuts for education, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted Monday to scale back an anti-poverty program just a year after expanding it. But in a much-debated compromise, the board took only 21 schools out of the program, instead of the 40 recommended by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Many of the schools were included in the program, known as Title I, for the first time last year.

"Shocking," is how Pasadena Mayor Bill Paparian describes a city report which estimates that more than 19,000 children in the community are going hungry on a regular basis. The report, compiled from public and private agencies, paints a very different picture from Pasadena that the world sees each January when it hosts the Rose Parade.

Here is a week in the life at Lampson Elementary School, a pioneer on behalf of its needy: Five children received free medical exams at the school's mobile health van, 27 parents learned how to read to their children, and a dozen or so mothers and fathers brainstormed ways to become better parents at a monthly support group.

A lot of government programs for poor communities begun in the lifetime of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. are being cut back now. But organizations born in that time go on and, indeed, are finding new ways to grow here in Southern California. Watts Health Foundation has bought a majority stake in Family Savings Bank with the aim of tapping and supporting economic opportunities in South-Central Los Angeles and other neighborhoods.

Why, friends demanded to know, was I determined to go to this remote and euphonious city, the capital of Burkina Faso known to its residents simply as Ouaga? It started with a desire to attend FESPACO, the Pan-African film festival held every other year and considered the premier cultural event on the entire continent. Never mind that an overseas advisory service typically called Burkina "not near the top of anyone's short list of travel destinations."

A majority of poor families in the state include parents who hold down full- or part-time jobs that do not pay enough to move them above the poverty line, according to a new report that paints a bleak picture of the economic well-being of California's children. At least 1.

Michael Nahhal, a Christian relief worker in Iraq, said one scene sticks in his mind: As if out of nowhere, boys with ashen faces and wiry frames appeared at the door of a sandwich shop in the southern Iraqi city of Basra as he and associates from the Iraqi Red Crescent ordered something to eat. The youngest boy couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 years old, he said, the oldest 13. Nahhal described their bare feet, ragged clothes and long, disheveled hair. "They were begging.

The incidence of childhood poverty is higher in the United States than in any other industrialized country, and U.S. government programs do less to combat it, a private anti-hunger advocacy group said Wednesday. The report, prepared by Bread for the World, said 21.5% of Americans younger than 18 live in poverty. The next-highest rate in an industrial country was 14.1%, in Australia. Finland had the lowest rate at 2.5%.

Try walking, even for a few hours, alongside Brian Rogers, a strapping teen who dropped out of a South-Central high school to escape gang violence, or Claudia Acosta, a young single mom from an abusive family in Pico-Union, and the scope of the problem becomes clear.