President Obama Goes on Record on Child Poverty
With 22% of children in America living in poverty, millions regularly go hungry and struggle for access to medical care and early education programs. And these adversities may interfere with optimal brain growth in early childhood and learning impediments during school years. That’s why I have been helping organize an effort involving six of the nation’s leading child advocates to give voice to this critical issue.
As part of this effort, we wrote President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romneylast month to ask what they intended to do from the White House – short-term and long-term – to address the extraordinary challenges of kids stuck in multiple adversities of persistent poverty.
While the Romney campaign has informed us that they would not respond in writing to our request, we recently received a reply from the Obama campaign delineating what the president has done and will continue to do in terms of the safety net programs and new initiatives.
In his response, President Obama cites his administration’s record on addressing poverty over the