Given the task definition and input, reply with output. In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.

Three-year-old Saria Amaya waits with her mother after receiving shoes and school supplies during a charity event in October to help more than 4,000 underprivileged children at the Fred Jordan Mission in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. Children from low-income families now make up a majority of public school students in the nation, according to a new report. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images) 
  
 For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation. 
  
 The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers. 
  
 “We’ve all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it’s here sooner rather than later,” said Michael A. Rebell of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University, noting that the poverty rate has been increasing even as the economy has improved. “A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.” 
  
 The shift to a majority-poor student population means that in public schools, a growing number of children start kindergarten already trailing their more privileged peers and rarely, if ever, catch up. They are less likely to have support at home, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school, and are more likely to drop out and never attend college. 
  
 It also means that education policy, funding decisions and classroom instruction must adapt to the needy children who arrive at school each day. 
  
 “When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches. 
  
 She helps them clean up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes. 
  
 Romero-Smith, 40, who has been a teacher for 19 years, became a foster mother in November to two girls, sisters who attend her school. They had been homeless, their father living on the streets and their mother in jail, she said. When she brought the girls home, she was shocked by the disarray of their young lives. 
  
 “Getting rid of bedbugs, that took us a while. Night terrors, that took a little while. Hoarding food, flushing a toilet and washing hands, it took us a little while,” she said. “You spend some time with little ones like this and it’s gut wrenching. . . . These kids aren’t thinking, ‘Am I going to take a test today?’ They’re thinking, ‘Am I going to be okay?’ ” 
  
 The job of teacher has expanded to “counselor, therapist, doctor, parent, attorney,” she said. 
  
 Schools, already under intense pressure to deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards, face the doubly difficult task of trying to raise the achievement of poor children so that they approach the same level as their more affluent peers. 
  
 “This is a watershed moment when you look at that map,” said Kent McGuire, president of the Southern Education Foundation, the nation’s oldest education philanthropy, referring to a large swath of the country filled with high-poverty schools. 
  
 “The fact is, we’ve had growing inequality in the country for many years,” he said. “It didn’t happen overnight, but it’s steadily been happening. Government used to be a source of leadership and innovation around issues of economic prosperity and upward mobility. Now we’re a country disinclined to invest in our young people.” 
  
 The data show poor students spread across the country, but the highest rates are concentrated in Southern and Western states. In 21 states, at least half the public school children were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches — ranging from Mississippi, where more than 70 percent of students were from low-income families, to Illinois, where one of every two students was low-income. 
  
 Carey Wright, Mississippi’s state superintendent of education, said quality preschool is the key to helping poor children. 
  
 “That’s huge,” she said. “These children can learn at the highest levels, but you have to provide for them. You can’t assume they have books at home, or they visit the library or go on vacations. You have to think about what you’re doing across the state and ensuring they’re getting what other children get.” 
  
 Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, was born in a charity hospital in 1959 to a single mother. Federal programs helped shrink the obstacles he faced, first by providing him with Head Start, the early-childhood education program, and later, Pell grants to help pay tuition at the University of Texas, he said. 
  
 The country needs to make that same commitment today to help poor children, he said. 
  
 “Even at 8 or 9 years old, I knew that America wanted me to succeed,” he said. “What we know is that the mobility escalator has simply stopped for some Americans. I was able to ride that mobility escalator in part because there were so many people, and parts of our society, cheering me on.” 
  
 “We need to fix the escalator,” he said. “We fix it by recommitting ourselves to the idea of public education. We have the capacity. The question is, do we have the will?” 
  
 The new report raises questions among educators and officials about whether states and the federal government are devoting enough money — and using it effectively — to meet the complex needs of poor children. 
  
 The Obama administration wants Congress to add $1 billion to the $14.4 billion it spends annually to help states educate poor children. It also wants Congress to fund preschool for those from low-income families. Collectively, the states and the federal government spend about $500 billion annually on primary and secondary schools, about $79 billion of it from Washington. 
  
 The amount spent on each student can vary wildly from state to state. States with high student-poverty rates tend to spend less per student: Of the 27 states with the highest percentages of student poverty, all but five spent less than the national average of $10,938 per student. 
  
 Republicans in Congress have been wary of new spending programs, arguing that more money is not necessarily the answer and that federal dollars could be more effective if redundant programs were streamlined and more power was given to states. 
  
 Many Republicans also think that the government ought to give tax dollars to low-income families to use as vouchers for private-school tuition, believing that is a better alternative to public schools. 
  
 GOP leaders in Congress have rebuffed President Obama’s calls to fund preschool for low-income families, although a number of Republican and Democratic governors have initiated state programs in the past several years. 
  
 The report comes as Congress begins debate about rewriting the country’s main federal education law, first passed as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and designed to help states educate poor children. The most recent version of the law, known as No Child Left Behind, has emphasized accountability and outcomes, measuring whether schools met benchmarks and sanctioning them when they fell short. 
  
 That federal focus on results, as opposed to need, is wrong­headed, Rebell said. 
  
 “We have to think about how to give these kids a meaningful education,” he said. “We have to give them quality teachers, small class sizes, up-to-date equipment. But in addition, if we’re serious, we have to do things that overcome the damages­ of poverty. We have to meet their health needs, their mental health needs, after-school programs, summer programs, parent engagement, early-childhood services. These are the so-called wraparound services. Some people think of them as add-ons. They’re not. They’re imperative.” ||||| 2015 - Low income students are now a majority of the schoolchildren attending the nation’s public schools, according to this research bulletin. The latest data collected from the states by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), show that 51 percent of the students across the nation’s public schools were low income in 2013. 
  
 In 40 of the 50 states, low income students comprised no less than 40 percent of all public schoolchildren. In 21 states, children eligible for free or reduced-price lunches were a majority of the students in 2013. 
  
 Most of the states with a majority of low income students are found in the South and the West. Thirteen of the 21 states with a majority of low income students in 2013 were located in the South, and six of the other 21 states were in the West. 
  
 Mississippi led the nation with the highest rate: ­71 percent, almost three out of every four public school children in Mississippi, were low-income. The nation’s second highest rate was found in New Mexico, where 68 percent of all public school students were low income in 2013. 
  
 This defining moment in America’s public education has been developing over several decades, and SEF has documented the trends and implications in two prior reports. In its 2013 report, SEF Vice President Steve Suitts wrote: “No longer can we consider the problems and needs of low income students simply a matter of fairness… Their success or failure in the public schools will determine the entire body of human capital and educational potential that the nation will possess in the future. Without improving the educational support that the nation provides its low income students – students with the largest needs and usually with the least support -- the trends of the last decade will be prologue for a nation not at risk, but a nation in decline…" 
  
 Download the research bulletin, map and new county-level maps. ||||| Bloomberg News 
  
 A student reads a book in Chinese during a second grade class at Broadway Elementary School, part of the city of Los Angeles' public school system, in Venice, Photographer: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images 
  
 A majority of U.S. public-school children are living in poverty for the first time in half a century. 
  
 Fifty-one percent of public-school students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch in 2013, the Southern Education Foundation said in a report. In Mississippi, the poorest state, 71 percent of students were in the category, a proxy for low income. 
  
 “The economy has simply failed to provide enough higher-income jobs to keep folks from being in or near poverty,” Steve Suitts, vice president of the Atlanta-based foundation, said Friday by e-mail. 
  
 An increase in births among low-income families and a decline among wealthier Americans contributed to the change in poverty rate, said Suitts, who wrote the report. Poor children last made up a majority of public-school students in the 1960s, a trend that was reversed through President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Suitts said. 
  
 In 40 states, low-income students made up at least 40 percent of school enrollment. States with the highest numbers of poor children were in the South and the West. New Mexico had the second-highest poverty rate. 
  
 New Hampshire had the lowest rate, 27 percent, followed by North Dakota. 
  
 A student from a single-parent family qualified for free lunch in 2013 if household income was less than $19,669 and for reduced-price lunch if income was less than $27,991. 
  
 To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Staiti in Boston at cstaiti@bloomberg.net 
  
 To contact the editors responsible for this story: John Hechinger at jhechinger@bloomberg.net Tony Robinson, John Lear ||||| We’ve passed a sobering milestone in this country. For the first time in at least 50 years, the majority of students in public schools are considered poor. That’s according to a new report from the Southern Education Foundation, which found that more than half of students in 2013 qualified for free and reduced-price lunch at school. Eligibility for free or reduced lunch is a widely-used, if imperfect, measure of poverty. 
  
 “This is a defining moment,” says Steve Suitts, the foundation's vice president. 
  
 We tend to think of poverty as a problem concentrated in rural areas or the inner city, he says. Those boundaries are falling away. 
  
 “Even in the suburbs, low-income students are now 40 percent of the student population in the public schools,” Suitts says. “It’s everyone’s problem.” |||||

One more challenge for US public schools: A new report finds that for the first time in 50 years, a majority of students come from poor families. Specifically, the Southern Education Foundation says that 51% of students in kindergarten through 12th grade qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, a percentage that has been steadily increasing over the years. Mississippi fared the worst, with 71% of its students in the "low-income" group, while New Hampshire did the best with 27%, reports Bloomberg. The lunch stat is a "rough proxy for poverty," reports the Washington Post, and the percentage hasn't been this high since Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" in the 1960s, says the president of the foundation that collected the data. “We’ve all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it’s here sooner rather than later,” says the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Columbia University. See Marketplace.org for an interactive map that shows each state's percentage.