Official: Thousands of city children go hungry
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on October 7, 2014 1:46 PM
Thousands of children in Goldsboro and Wayne County are going hungry, the City Council was told Monday night.
During the work session before the council meeting, Shycole Simpson-Carter, the city's community development administrator, said North Carolina is tied with Louisiana as being one of the worst states for child hunger in the nation. As many as 8,000 kids go hungry every day in Wayne County, she said, citing a 2014 Feeding America study.
While children do receive free or reduced lunches at school, the issue is that they aren't receiving food at home or on the weekends and holidays, she said.
Council members were appalled that hunger was so prevalent in Wayne County.
"I didn't know how bad it was," Councilman Chuck Allen said. "But now that we know and have been made aware of it, to not do anything about it is inhuman."
Ms. Simpson-Carter also said that at North Drive Elementary School and Carver Heights Elementary School, more than 97 percent of children at each school live in poverty, which contributes to them going hungry.
"This is ridiculous," Mayor Al King said. "We have this many kids going hungry in Wayne County? This is crazy."
Councilman Michael Headen said he attended a school on Monday during the day, although he did not reveal which school, and said a child was acting up and causing a ruckus.
"I pulled him off to the side and asked him why he was acting like that," Headen said. "He said, 'Man, I'm hungry.' That's a survival mechanism. When you're hungry, the body is telling you that you're hungry, and you can't focus on anything else but doing whatever it takes to get food. All the research points to hunger being a main cause of behavioral and developmental problems."
Headen also warned that hungry children who develop behavioral and developmental problems don't just fix themselves.
"The same hungry kids acting up now grow up to become the (police) chief's problem," Headen said. "Then you have people going 'Arrest this guy!' It isn't something that just goes away. This thing snowballs and becomes bigger."
To combat the problem, Ms. Simpson-Carter said the city can put inserts in utility bills informing people of the problem as well as how they can help provide food to children, as well as informing families of where the food banks are in the city.
"People want to feed kids," Allen said. "Nobody wants a kid to go hungry."
Ms. Simpson-Carter also said the Parks and Recreation department might be an untapped resource for feeding children when school is not in session.
While Parks and Recreation already feeds children during the summer at certain points, the department can apply for a grant from the National Recreation and Park Association that would provide funding for feeding children on the weekend, after school and over the holidays.
In other business, Matt Hayes of Alta Greenways came before the council to present a tentative development plan for the Wayne County greenway system.
In the process of developing an action plan, Hayes said 11 miles of worn footpaths have been mapped in the city alone.
Worn footpaths are areas where people are clearly walking, but no sidewalk is in place for people to use.
Hayes also said 38 bikers and pedestrians were struck by vehicles within the city limits of Goldsboro during the past year alone, and that constructing pathways for citizen use could help prevent accidents from happening.
Input from the public was crucial to developing the plan, Hayes said, and members of his team went to a number of public events to gather opinion on the greenway system.
The full plan has been released at goldsborogreenway.weebly.com, and public comment on the development plan is open until Oct. 31. Comments can be sent to Jennifer Collins at jcollins@goldsboronc.gov.
The council also heard a report on the restoration of the F-86 fighter jet that used to be next to the police department. Once it is refurbished, t plane will be relocated to a site behind the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base monument on Center Street.
A change order on the ongoing Streetscape project downtown was approved. The original change order called for an additional $431,000 in funding to change the use of PVC piping for the sewer system to ductile iron. The change came after analyzing the soil under Center Street and discovering there were pockets of soil that would cause PVC pipe to erode fairly quickly.
After analyzing the change order, city officials said it would be cost-prohibitive to place a change order for that amount. Instead, the city approved a change order for $160,000 to place ductile iron piping with special gaskets in areas where the soil's integrity was in question.