REPORT One in four children in Sask. lives in poverty

REGINA As a line of Grade 2 students at Sacred Heart Community School filled their plates with lunch, some chose to sit down and wait for the server to come around with ketchup. Others waited for nothing, eating on their feet right next to the food cart.

“It’s hard to learn on an empty stomach,” said principal David Magnusson, repeating an adage — one that might ring painfully true for many of his students, were it not for the some 350 free lunches his school provides each day.

Roughly one in four children in Saskatchewan live in poverty, according to the authors of a report released Tuesday by the University of Regina. That’s well above the national rate of 17.4 per cent, listed in the report.

Sacred Heart also provides more than 100 free breakfasts each morning as part of the meal program. Community partners make food donations to the program and the rest of the cost comes out of the school’s budget.

“The alternative would probably be going without breakfast or going without lunch for a lot of our students,” Magnusson said.

“It helps families out,” he continued, going on to note that some might be able to provide their child with a lunch, but that would just mean less money to put toward other areas of need.

The school doesn’t question the financial status of students.

Lunches are available to all, Magnusson said.

“There’s always been a need,” he said. “But each year, we see more and more students taking advantage of breakfast and lunch programs to help out, and families as well, coming in, looking for support,” he added.

Food donated by community partnerships that isn’t used in the school’s program is set out for families to collect, he said.

Despite a period of strong economic growth in the past decade, Saskatchewan’s child poverty rate hasn’t fluctuated much from the 24.1 per cent indicated in Tuesday’s report, according to Garson Hunter, a social work professor and one of the report’s authors.

“It’s been steady for decades,” he said.

For children in Aboriginal identity families, the poverty rate increases to 49.4 per cent, or nearly one in two, according to the report.

What’s more, Hunter said, is that the Statistics Canada poverty data available on Indigenous families is not complete because it doesn’t account for those living on reserve.

If it did, the poverty rate among Indigenous children would look even worse, he said.

“The benefits aren’t that much different on-reserve (than) offreserve,” he said.

“We do know the employment opportunities, though, on First Nations communities are much less than in urban centres.”

The report includes the numbers of Saskatchewan children living in poverty as well as how poor some of their families are — a measurement it deems the “depth” of poverty.

For instance, in 2015, the poverty line for a lone-parent family with one child was $25,498.

It goes on to say that one in two of the families living beneath that line made less than $12,290 — not even half what is considered poverty level income.

The report’s authors claim they will release more locally focused, regional reports on poverty in the months to come.

Future reports will include children as well as elderly people and individuals without children.