• State not paying bills: Social services in doubt, By Andre Salles, November 18, 2009, Geneva Sun: “Every day, Cindy Worsley looks through her mail, hunting for a check from the state of Illinois. And every day, she comes up empty. Worsley is the executive director of Fox Valley Older Adult Services. The not-for-profit company, based in Sandwich, has been providing help and care to seniors in the Fox Valley for 37 years. It operates three adult day care sites — one in Aurora (called Rachel’s Place), one in Sandwich, and one in DeKalb — and provides in-home care, meals and transportation services to more than 200 seniors each day. But now, Worsley is preparing for the worst. The services she provides are dependent on state funding to continue, and those payments are months late. She did receive a check from the state about six weeks ago, she said, which paid the state’s obligations through June. But she’s essentially been operating since July with no state cash at all, and she’s owed about $140,000…”
• Budget cuts will imperil state’s poor, By David Abel, November 17, 2009, Boston Globe: “Maria Bonilla - who has trouble walking because of a congenital heart defect - feeds, houses, and clothes her two young children with $942 of state and federal cash assistance every month, though it barely covers her rent, utilities, and everything else her family needs to survive, from diapers to subway fare. But in a few months the 27-year-old victim of domestic violence expects to be homeless. The Bonilla family is one of thousands of low-income families who will suffer from steep budget cuts. The state estimates that the children of 9,100 families with parents so severely disabled that they qualify for federal Supplemental Security Income benefits will lose their state cash assistance as a result of the $600 million in budget cuts that Governor Deval Patrick announced late last month. The $15.8 million reduction of the Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, on top of $8 million in cuts made earlier this fiscal year, means families who receive the assistance will lose an average of more than $400 a month…”

• Jobless benefits set to expire unless Congress acts, By Erik Eckholm, November 18, 2009, New York Times: “About one million laid-off workers will see their unemployment benefits end in January unless Congress acts quickly to renew existing federally paid extensions, according to a new survey and legislators and state officials. The record-long extension of emergency benefits that was hastily signed into law on Nov. 6 was widely praised as an essential lifeline for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had spent a year or more in fruitless searches for jobs. The new law provided up to 14 weeks of federally paid aid to unemployed people who had exhausted existing state and federal limits, benefits that already extended up to 79 weeks in many states. And for the majority of states with particularly high unemployment, it added an additional six weeks of payments, bringing the potential total to 99 weeks…”
• Extension of jobless benefits won’t help many, By Jane M. Von Bergen, November 17, 2009, Philadelphia Inquirer: “On the same day the U.S. Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate had reached a landmark 10.2 percent, President Obama signed a law extending unemployment benefits by up to 20 weeks in some states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey. ‘I was so relieved,’ said Dawn Brown, 41, a mother of two from North Wales who lost her market-data research job in June. ‘It just took all the worry away.’ But the new law won’t help Brown at all - or anybody else who has been laid off since late June. Not only that, but, as written, no one in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or any of the nation’s other high-unemployment states will be eligible for the last six weeks of the 20-week extension. It’s all a matter of timing. And the timing is tricky…”
• Jobless Tennesseans won’t get as many extra benefits, By Bonna Johnson, November 18, 2009, The Tennessean: “Additional unemployment benefits that Congress approved for the jobless earlier this month won’t be as sweet as most people expected due to fine print in the law. The upshot is that instead of 20 weeks of extra benefits at a maximum of $300 a week, many Tennesseans probably will draw only 14 more weeks - on top of 79 weeks previously received - before the aid runs out due to a Dec. 31 cutoff date. The mix-up is confusing and confounding to many jobless workers who have exhausted or are about to run out of their government aid. Approximately 35,500 Tennesseans getting unemployment checks could be affected. Still, some people said they’re just happy to be getting anything…”

• Half of U.S. children will use food stamps, study finds, By Alfred Lubrano, November 18, 2009, Philadelphia Inquirer: “In a stark and surprising finding, about half the children in the United States will be on food stamps at some point during their childhood, a new study of 29 years of data shows. One in three white children and 90 percent of all black children - ages 1 through 20 - will use the program, according to the research, published this month in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. ‘This means Americans’ economic distress is much higher than we had ever realized,’ said Thomas A. Hirschl, a sociology professor at Cornell University and a coauthor of the study with Mark R. Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis. The survey finds that continued food-stamp usage signifies a kind of poverty that is ‘a threat to the overall health and well-being of American children, and, as such, represents a significant challenge to pediatricians in their daily practice.’ The persistent poverty described in the survey dovetails with the findings of a U.S. Department of Agriculture study released Monday. It determined that 49 million Americans - 17 million of them children - were unable to consistently get enough food to eat in 2008. Nearly 15 percent of households were having trouble finding food, the highest number recorded since the agency began measuring hunger in 1995…”
• Hunger in the United States, Editorial, November 17, 2009, New York Times: “Congress should make a priority of expanding federal nutrition programs that are aimed at helping millions of struggling families feed their children. The need to bolster these programs was underscored again this week in a dismaying Department of Agriculture study showing that a record number of households had trouble getting sufficient food at one time or another last year…”

‘New schools’ to serve poor students proposed, By Emily Johns, November 18, 2009, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune: “The Minneapolis school board will get a chance next month to give its blessing to the creation of up to five autonomous schools in the city. The district hopes the schools, some of which wouldn’t be run by the district, could more effectively educate poor students and be a lab for innovation regarding what works in urban education. ‘There are a number of new autonomous schools across the country that have demonstrated tremendous success with economically disadvantaged children,’ said Jon Bacal, who heads the district’s new Office of New Schools. ‘The end result should be a high-quality learning program for Minneapolis children.’ The Office of New Schools is an effort to address quality issues in the lowest-performing 25 percent of the district’s schools. Converting one of these schools to a “new school” is one method; others include changing leadership, school staff or curriculums…”