alabama possible from the alabama poverty project

Mobile Register

Jim Aucoin

February 8, 2006

AS FUNNY as it may sound, one of the better arguments supporting a rural development center for Alabama is the existence of Sri Lanka, an island country off the coast of India.

We’ll get to Sri Lanka, but first it’s important to praise committees in both the House and Senate that have taken steps toward creating just such a center, which is to be called the Center for Rural Alabama. Legislators should make the proposal a reality.

A rural development center can bring expertise. Larry Lee of Opelika told legis- lators last week, “Rural Alabama is not urban Alabama in a different suit of clothes.”

More important, though, a center devoted to helping rural areas could direct much- needed attention to rural poverty, one of the state’s more persistent modern problems.

For example, the Alabama Poverty Project at Auburn University, Montgomery reported that poverty levels dropped in Alabama’s cities during the 1990s, but remained steady at over 30 percent in many rural areas. The state’s poorest county is Wilcox in southwest Alabama, where nearly 40 percent of adults and half the children live in poverty.

Indeed, while Alabama’s cities enjoy economic prosperity, many of the state’s rur- al citizens live in unrelenting poverty at nearly double the rate of the state’s average.

Law Lamar of Hale County recently brought Sri Lanka into the debate. “It hits you when you go to a school and there’s a globe in the classroom that has Ceylon on it,” he told legislators, “and you know that Ceylon became Sri Lanka in 1972.”

If poverty-stricken rural schools can’t properly educate their students, what hope is there for rural Alabama?

Admittedly, a rural development center couldn’t single-handedly bring hope and prosperity to country schools and rural communities. But it would be a powerful beginning.