ces (OES). Demand for services often far outstrips the available resources, and many children are on long waiting lists for needed support. More than 46 percent of Mott Haven's children are the recipients of some kind of public assistance, in part a result of the fact that the district is one of the two poorest in all of New York City; more than 56 percent of households in Mott Haven have an annual income of $10,000 or less (Woudstra, 199, p. 158). Mott Haven's school-age children are in greater-than-average need of special education programs, remedial tutoring, mental health counselling, afterschool care, supplemental lunch programs, foster care, and almost every other kind of social assistance program available or proposed for children living in poverty in America.
Poverty, as measured by the U. S. government, is a fixed indicator on an economic scale. The majority residents of Mott Haven live in poverty on any such arbitrary scale, and the district's children, as is often the case, are the greatest victims of the lack of money and other resources avaialbel in the area. Claudia J. Coulton and Julian Chow (1995) observe, "Age is an important determinant of poverty status . . . Since the mid-1970s, the poverty rate for children has been higher than for other age groups" (p. 1869). Poverty is also higher among minorities, and Mott Haven's residents are almost exclusively Latino and black, making them more at risk than their white counterparts.
Bruce S. Jansson (1997) outlines the history of social welfare programs in the United States. He calls the approach that has grown out of this heritage "the reluctant welfare state," and argues, "The predicament of people with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, in which a desperate medical condition is compounded by unfavorable health and social policies, was foreshadowed by the treatment of those with malaria, typhoid fever, cholera, and syphilis in earlier eras" (p. 1).
The American...