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Schools In Vancouver, WA, Have Prioritized Helping Students And Families In Poverty

Mike Siegel
/
The Seattle Times
Chelsea Unger, center, is the Family-Community Resource Center coordinator at Hudson’s Bay High in Vancouver, Wash. ";

The mission of public schools is to provide an education to all students, but in many cases they’ve also become a de facto social safety net.

The Seattle Times reported in a recent feature that schools in Vancouver, Washington, have become a model for providing help to students and families in need. In response to increasing poverty among its students, the district has created family-community resource centers in more than half its schools.

Neal Morton of the Seattle Times Education Lab team sat down with KNKX to talk about his story and the school employees, students and families he met in the course of his reporting.  

In July 2017, Ashley Gross became KNKX's youth and education reporter after years of covering the business and labor beat. She joined the station in May 2012 and previously worked five years at WBEZ in Chicago, where she reported on business and the economy. Her work telling the human side of the mortgage crisis garnered awards from the Illinois Associated Press and the Chicago Headline Club. She's also reported for the Alaska Public Radio Network in Anchorage and for Bloomberg News in San Francisco.