Rural Kansas in recent years has been battered by drought, a weak farm economy and the slow demise of many of its small towns.

Now a new national study has found that with Kansas families leaving the countryside for brighter prospects in the city, more than half of the state’s poor children live in rural settings.

“What’s happening is that as more and more young families leave the rural areas in search of jobs and decent pay, the families that for whatever reason can’t or won’t leave tend to be lower income,” said Gary Brunk, executive director of Kansas Action for Children. “So as the population numbers decline, a higher and higher percentage are poor.”

The 2000 U.S. Census reported 83,957 Kansas children living in households at or below the federal poverty guideline. Of those children:

• 41,714 lived in cities or suburbs.
• 42,243 lived in rural settings.

“Most of us tend to think of poor kids as being grouped in places like Wyandotte, Sedgwick or Shawnee counties,” Brunk said. “But when you look at the raw numbers, you’ll see that there are just as many and more living in the nonmetropolitan areas.”

Head Start student Sierra Bueno plays a computer spelling game as Cheyenne Ferris watches at the Head Start program in Ottawa. Federal funds for programs for the poor, including Head Start, are allocated to states based on formulas biased toward urban areas -- a fact that is troubling as poverty takes hold in Kansas' rural areas. Sierra and Cheyenne are pictured Tuesday.

A family of four living on less than $18,000 a year is below the poverty guideline.

Wider difference

The trend is not new. William O’Hare, a social demographer at the Annie E. Casey Foundation who worked on the report released Tuesday by the Washington, D.C.,-based Population Reference Bureau, said the 1990 Census, too, reported most of Kansas’ poor children in the state’s rural areas.

But “the difference was even wider in 1990 than it was in 2002,” O’Hare said.

Other findings:

Task force’s study of rural Kansas sees ‘opportunity to be seized’ (04-10-04) Rural Life Task Force report (pdf) Ag chief urges vision in recharging rural Kansas (3-31-04) Rural revitalization proposal stalls (3-25-04) New Homestead Act aims to bolster rural populations (3-16-04) Reversal of rural decline urged (2-12-04) Brownback explains federal incentives proposal to retain rural populations (2-10-04) Bill Snead’s Parched Prairie Cattle call in the Flint Hills

• In the United States, one of every five children lives in poverty.
• Of the 50 U.S. counties with the highest percentage of children living in poverty, 48 are rural.
• In 80 U.S. counties, at least 40 percent of the children are poor; four of the top five are within or part of Indian reservations in South Dakota.

In Buffalo, Ziebach and Shannon counties in South Dakota, 61 percent of the area’s 7,256 children are poor.

• In seven states — Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and West Virginia — more than one-fourth of the children in rural areas are poor.

Kansas’ numbers aren’t as severe; 14 percent of the state’s rural-area children are poor. In Douglas County, according to the report, 9 percent of children are poor.

Sheridan County, in northwest Kansas near the Colorado and Nebraska borders, has the highest percentage of children in poverty: 28 percent.

Attracting the poor

In eight Kansas counties, at least 20 percent of the children are poor; five of the eight counties are in the western one-third of the state.

Three of the counties — Sheridan, Wallace and Wichita counties — are in State Sen. Stan Clark’s 18-county district in the northwest corner of the state.

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” said Clark, a Republican from Oakley. “In Wallace County from August of 2000 and February of 2003, they had between 12 and 13 inches of rain. They went three years without the grass even greening up. The last time they had more than an inch of rain in a 24-hour period was June 20 of 2003.

“In Graham County — that’s the county next door east of Sheridan County — there was one new home built last year. It was the first new home built in Graham County in 13 years,” Clark said.

“Over in Sharon Springs in Wallace County, the teachers went to the school board because there was talk of the board’s having to lay off teachers to make up for declining enrollment. The teachers asked that they be given a pay cut instead so they can still have jobs and still live in the area.”

In recent years, Clark said, several low-income families have moved into his district to take advantage of the area’s below-average housing costs.

“It seems we’re attracting a lot of people who can’t afford to live in the Denver area,” he said. “A lot of them are struggling families.”

Clark said he was heartened by recent legislative efforts to encourage investment and entrepreneurism in the state’s rural sector.

“I’m not giving up,” he said.

Less attention, less aid

At the Population Reference Bureau, officials said they hoped the report would increase state and federal support for rural poverty programs.

“When policy decisions are being made, there’s a tendency to pay more attention to the urban areas because that’s where the most people are,” said O’Hare. “That’s understandable, but poverty is just as problematic, if not more so, in the nonmetropolitan areas. You just don’t hear about it as much.”

It’s a disparity that East Central Kansas Economic Opportunity Corp. knows well.

“We deal with it on a daily basis,” said ECKAN executive director Richard Jackson. “Federal funds are allocated to states based on formulas that lend more to the urban areas. It affects a lot.”

ECKAN runs Head Start preschool programs in nine counties in northeast Kansas, including Douglas and Franklin counties.