I have spent a great deal of time lately working on a grant proposal to get VISTA volunteers for ATN. I absolutely hate anything business related and would far, far prefer to be doing the service side of things than the business side of things. Must be why they finally figured out towards the end of my time in vet school that it would be wise to teach vets to be business managers as well… it isn’t necessarily an inherent ability.


Anyway, as I was writing up the section on “Community Needs” I needed some statistics. According to Ohio State University…

The poverty rates of high school dropouts is three times higher than the poverty rate among high school graduates. In 1994 the poverty rate was 27% for men and 38% for women 25 to 54 years of age who did not finish high school.

Considering that my daughter just quit on high school for the second time…that hit pretty close to home.


Here’s another sad statistic…

34% of homeless young adults (ages 20-24) and 61% of homeless very young adults (ages 18-19) were in welfare/foster placement.

*from the Department of Sociology at Brown University

Not a very pretty picture, is it? Much as I hate to say it or predict it, I suspect my daughter will be one of those statistics. She isn’t working nearly enough hours per week at her fast food job to maintain any kind of lifestyle. She has been living off of savings… or perhaps some “found money” that we became aware of that was in an Indiana bank… left over from our time there apparently. She has to submit some simple paperwork and if she does, she’ll collect over $2600. It would certainly pay her rent for a few months. Do you think she’ll send off the form? When we moved from Illinois to Kansas she didn’t bring her money with her… in spite of numerous reminders to do so. Of course, we “fixed” it again, and closed out her account. It was that money that she has been living off of this past year.


It makes me so sad to think about what lies ahead… I SO hope she proves me wrong.

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