Reflections on Rome and historical perspectives

¶ … role of family, culture and nutrition on learning development. The aim is to investigate the challenges that children encounter growing up in poverty. A lack of adequate financial resources typically places families at risk for instability, unemployment, and an absence of sufficient food and safe housing. As a result, young people growing up in these environments face physical and emotional challenges that may inhibit learning and educational development. My personal opinion is that school districts need to develop comprehensive programs that help support the needs of students from low-income homes to ensure that their personal hardships do not block their educational development.

According to Gorski (2008), families living in poverty are more likely to experience issues of poor health care, lack of safe, affordable housing, inadequate employment opportunities, and poor nutrition. These living conditions often impede an individual's ability to grow and develop to his or her full potential. Many children growing up in poverty experience set backs in their learning due to disruptions their development such as illness, malnutrition or family instability that often leave them unable to focus or fully participate in their own education.

Gorski (2008) also notes that young people growing up in impoverished areas are more likely to attend underfunded schools. These institutions often have large class sizes, uncredentialed teachers, and a lack of basic resources such as safe, clean classroom spaces. Underfunded schools in poor communities also tend to lack the funding to offer students extra support services, such as counseling, before and after school care, or nutrition and wellness programs that they often need to stay healthy and remain involved in their educations.

In a report prepared for the National Center for Children in Poverty, Klein and Knitzer (2007) note that many children in poverty have significant cognitive delays and lower achievement than their more advantaged peers. This report notes that early intevention programs to emphasize reading skills and vocabulary acquisition can help reduce the achievement gap that typically develops between low-income students and their middle or high income peers. In addition, teachers working with low-income students should be adequately trained with the minimum of a Bachelor's degree and specialized training in their area of teaching. For example, a teacher working with low-income students at the primary school level should be trained in early childhood education with a specialized focus in working with at-risk students from low-income backgrounds.