This week the Malheur Enterprise published the last in a series of stories looking at child poverty in the county. The series covered housing, mental health, food insecurity and more. We talk to Shane Dimapanat and Christina Chkarboul, who worked on the series, along with Andie Kalinowski, Suejin Lim and Venice Tang.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Malheur County has had the highest rate of child poverty in Oregon for more than a decade. It’s the subject of a new five-part series in the Malheur Enterprise. Student journalists from the University of Southern California focused on the struggles young people are facing with mental health, housing education and more. I talked earlier to two of those journalists. Shane Dimapanat and Christina Chkarboul, are juniors at USC. I started by asking Christina why it is that Malheur County leads the state in child poverty.
Christina Chkarboul: Malheur is the poorest county in the state. It has about a 21% poverty rate, like a general poverty rate, which is a lot higher than the national average. Just the way that it’s placed in eastern Oregon, it’s mostly agricultural. People don’t really go to Malheur County to start businesses, is what we’ve heard. People who are looking to start up ventures, to start up a coffee shop, they’ll go over the border to Boise because as we’ve heard, it’s easier to get business licenses and it just seems more profitable that way. And so there’s little influx of new businesses.
People aren’t necessarily attracted to living in Malheur County and it’s just had a pretty low level of development in terms of new housing development for quite a long time. And so it’s just a pattern of low economic development and a lack of investment opportunities, a lack of incentivization for new businesses that has just led to poverty.
Miller: How did you define child poverty in particular?
Chkarboul: We defined it as children that grow up with limited access to basic necessities like food, stable and affordable housing, the ability to obtain a meaningful education, to show up to school on time and to be present. And so kids who grow up without that are considered to be in child poverty.
Shane Dimapanat: And it’s nice that you ask us what is the definition of child poverty because even from state to state, the definition of child poverty is very different. And that’s why we wanted to create this framework that was much broader, that focused more on the qualitative aspect of child poverty, like not having housing, not having enough food, not having access to a good education. And as for the state, for Oregon, for example, you might be considered low income if for example, you’re on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) or if you receive EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer), you would then be low income. And we just wanted to focus more on the qualitative aspect of it when we came to the definition.
Miller: Shane, one of the things you focused on in one of your articles is housing. Can you describe a meeting that you sat in on between the homeless liaison for the Ontario School District and one of the students she serves, a boy who you called Manuel?
Dimapanat: Yes. We use the name Manuel because when he’s a minor, too, he just wants to keep him protected because if you search up his real name and then he’s applying to jobs, boom. You see that first thing. Yeah. Mary Ann Almaraz, she’s a homeless liaison in the school district. She’s great. She works with several children who are described legally as homeless under the McKinney-Vento Act.
Let me explain that she’s been working on with Manuel for the past few years, but she first met him and she wasn’t even a liaison yet. She was in middle school and she helps out kids with things like getting groceries, applying for housing, she gets clothes for them and even though it says homeless liaison and you think, oh yeah, she’s responsible only for housing. She is responsible for so much more than that, she’s there to help families to help kids improve their quality of life.
It’s a very heartwarming story because she and Manuel are not related, but they love each other. In the meeting that I described at the beginning, it was one of their weekly meetings. Every week as a liaison, she likes to meet her students weekly to ask them, hey, what are your needs? Are there any issues coming up? It’s like a check in with them. And at the end of one of those meetings, I asked Manuel, “so what does Mary Ann mean to you?” And then he just laughed and he was like, “oh gosh and said, well, I love her.” And then Mary Ann laughed and she said, “I love you, too.” And it’s just, I don’t know, it was heartwarming.
Miller: That’s the positive side that there’s also the harsh reality of just the number of students that this one homeless liaison, Mary Ann Almaraz, is seeing and then the question of how much she can do for them. What does she do?
Dimapanat: Ok. So for one example, if you’ve ever seen a housing application, it is thick, it is long, and it is difficult to fill out. And so for example, in the past year, she worked with 107 children across the Ontario school district. And then out of those 107 children, like you mentioned, what can she do? Well, she can help them apply. But out of those 107 children, only 16 got housing. So she can help these families fill out these applications, but at the end of the day, there’s only so much that individuals can do if one, rent is high, two, there’s not enough housing and even three, when you’re applying for housing, it’s even difficult to get through the process in the very first place. People don’t know who to go to.
Miller: You mentioned that Manuel is considered homeless. I should note that he is living with his older sisters despite the fact that under a federal designation, he is officially considered homeless. It does make me wonder how visible, in various ways, child poverty is in Malheur County or the flipside, how invisible it can be?
Dimapanat: Yeah, this is something that Christina could talk about, too. But starting off answering, we’ve met several childcare experts, people like Mary Ann and other people who study this issue and they say yes, these numbers are high, but we are not able to count all these children because you have people. For example, for the homelessness issue, you have people who go in and out of housing.
In the case of Manuel, he’s considered homeless because he doesn’t have a stable housing situation. He doesn’t live with his parents. We have another kid. He just graduated from high school and he gave his permission to use his name. He’s 18. His name is Lucas McManus. He’s also considered legally homeless. Why? He doesn’t have housing because he had to leave his parental home and then he was working a job. He’s trying to figure out, gosh, where do I need to live? And that’s why again, coming back to our child poverty definition, it’s kind of hard to be like, ok, here’s our strict cut-off income to be considered poor, to be considered in poverty. And that’s why we focus on the qualitative aspect of poverty.
Miller: Christina, you focused among other things on youth mental health for one of your articles. What kinds of issues are young people dealing with?
Chkarboul: Youth have a lot of unmet mental health needs and that percentage of kids who aren’t getting therapy when they should be is a lot higher among kids who are low income because they face additional barriers to accessing appointments to even getting to an appointment to start out with a care facility. There’s just so many things that kids who come from difficult upbringings, who don’t have very many resources or who aren’t getting enough support, they just have such a hard time even entering into the system of yes, I need to get help and I need to be at a certain place at a certain time where somebody will help me. That’s just in a lot of cases, it seems impossible for kids.
There’s also a couple of issues that are specific to Malheur County that I found in my mental health investigation. One of those is stigma about the contracted mental health provider, which is Lifeways. And so I just heard from a lot of parents and kids who are discouraged from even seeking help because of this provider, they know it as some place where you get court-ordered therapy or where your uncle was told to go because he has a substance use disorder. It’s not a place that you choose to go to. And so families and kids are basically restricted mentally from even seeking that kind of help. And these kids, especially with the effect of COVID, are facing a lot of mental health issues that include depression and anxiety. It also can manifest in suicide ideation. I found that suicide attempts and reports of suicide ideation at schools in Malheur County was notably higher this past school year than in previous years. And yeah, it was affected a lot by kids being home a lot, unsupervised, maybe out of touch with friends.
These kinds of mental health issues come up a lot more with kids who, for example, aren’t getting the food that they need, don’t have a steady place to live, maybe they don’t have a steady caregiver or maybe they’re bullied at school because of differences between their family and other kids’ families. And so kids, especially low income kids, are very overwhelmed. They take in the stress that they feel at home and they aren’t finding easy enough ways to deal with that. And I found that Malheur County providers are also incredibly overwhelmed and are short staffed. They want to help, but they just don’t have the capacity to. I’ve heard from one counselor that they were seeing patients about once every three weeks and that it didn’t matter how much the patient needed it, it was just that they physically couldn’t get somebody in more often than that because they didn’t have enough people working.
Miller: Shane, school has come up in a variety of ways right now, but we haven’t yet really talked about how all child poverty is affecting kids’ experiences of school and how it’s affecting their education. What did you hear?
Dimapanat: Well, for example, if you even look at it on a national scale which applies to Malheur County…the CDC says children who experience homelessness, kids like Manuel, kids who live in these poverty hotspots–which are poverty hotspots. They are places where poverty rates are 20% or more and where Manuel lives, it’s in Ontario. And then there are areas there that are experiencing poverty rates of 20% or more. These children are experiencing homelessness and these areas are sick at twice the rate of children who have homes, they go hungry twice as often as children who have homes and they have learning disabilities. And they have, as Christina mentioned, they have more emotional and behavioral problems.
And just for example, let’s take Lucas McManus, he was considered legally homeless. He worked with Mary Ann. He explained his difficulties with school because he said, well, one, I’m thinking about school, but on the other hand, I’m also thinking, oh, gosh, where am I going to live? We have Manuel who is living in, again, not a very stable housing situation and he’s considered poor. He has taken a break from school because there was violence in the area and he was caught up in that and he got stabbed only a year prior and then after that, he had to spend time recovering.
And when you’re dealing with all these different factors, when you’re worrying where can I go, what am I gonna eat, how exactly are you going to think about school when there are more pertinent issues that are related to your survival, to your day-to-day life? It affects a lot of things, much more than school.
Miller: Christina, at the end of the introductory article, you got into the question of solutions and I was struck by the sense that there really weren’t too many obvious concrete ideas that came from people you talk to. The general answer was something like it takes a village. But what does that mean in practice?
Chkarboul: We found that we really need state level support, federal support and the work that so many local organizations, mental health treatment centers, what all those good people are doing, we need all of those to work in tandem because it feels right now to a lot of people that there are initiatives, there are organizations doing their things and trying to have a positive impact, but it’s not enough. And when those efforts are splintered, when they’re independent of one another, they aren’t going to have the impact that they want to have and that they need to have for Malheur County’s kids to grow up to be functional adults. And so we found that a lot of things need to happen, that culture of shame about admitting help, that families, should be made to feel that they can reach out and ask for somebody like Mary Ann Almaraz to help them figure out a housing situation or to accept help from a food bank or to seek mental health care if they need it or if their kids need it. Things like the McKinney-Vento Act, state support like that for kids who are homeless or who are part of transient populations who have trouble finding housing. There just needs to be more resources put into meaningful legislation like that, that hasn’t really happened in the past or at least not at the level where it needs to be.
Then of course, there needs to be more staffing and that’s an issue across the country, of course, and it’s felt very much so in Malheur County. I talked to somebody who runs a mental health center in a health care center in Treasure Valley. And they told me that during COVID, they had a lot of an easier time getting counselors from other states to come work and help out when Malheur County had a dire need. Well, those COVID time measures are lifted and now it’s once again, harder for somebody who is say certified to be a mental health counselor in Idaho or in Texas to come and serve in Oregon. It’s a lot harder now, but that need is still there. It didn’t go anywhere.
And once again, symptoms of poverty like drug addiction, crime, absenteeism and missing education, those symptoms also need to be tackled in their own right. But it all stems from poverty. There just needs to be a more cohesive effort on all fronts really to try to address that.
Miller: Shane, before we go, you’re both student journalists at the beginning of your careers. I’m curious what it was like for you to work on a project of this magnitude and importance for me.
Dimapanat: It was very personal. I grew up in Yonkers, New York. I grew up on the southwest side of Yonkers. And it was very jarring for me to go to Malheur County, which is very different, not urban whatsoever. But then to see the same issues that my own community was experiencing back home in Yonkers, back home in New York. And for me, it was very personal because when I got there, I was able to meet these people or describing the same issues that my friends went through, that I’ve known people who I love dearly were going through and then to see these strangers going through. The same thing I was like, oh gosh, what can be done and having the opportunity to go into Malheur County with the help of Les Zaitz, an amazing journalist, and to really explore this issue and find some causes and to actually cause some real change in the county. It felt good. It showed that this phrase that we have is “journalism with an impact.” And yes, this is journalism with an impact. We saw that it got some people moving, there’s more talk about it and I learned a lot.
Miller: Shane and Christina, thanks very much.
Chkarboul: Thank you.
Miller: Shane Dimapanat and Christina Chkarboul are juniors at the University of Southern California. They are part of a team of USC students who worked on a series of articles about youth poverty as summer reporters for the Malheur Enterprise.
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