UMass Donahue Institute

Independence Day In Chesterfield, Mass., Attracts A Global Audience

Chesterfield is known by many for its quintessentially American Fourth of July festivities. It marked Independence Day with its 69th annual parade. The event drew locals and a global crowd, including a group of college students and teachers from Pakistan, South Sudan and more than a dozen other countries. They’re studying public policy this summer at UMass.

Medical student Wedyan Qusay is from Iraq, and says “We’re celebrating here the fourth of July. Happy fourth of July to all the Americans! And we’re so happy, so glad here… it’s great!”

Becky Howland from the Umass Donahue Institute, says the hilltown parade is a highlight for the visiting scholars, “We have people and they bring their flags and they support their country as well as ours. You know, most of us aren’t from here. We’re all from somewhere and I think it’s really great to celebrate that.”

The parade featured a stiltwalker dressed as Uncle Sam, floats, and classic cars.

Increase In ‘Chronic Emergency’ Hunger, Despite Positive Economic Indicators

by: Carrie Healy

For the first time since the Great Recession ended in 2009, the numbers show that western Massachusetts is seeing a decline in individuals seeking food assistance.

In the Hampshire County hilltown of Huntington, on Thursdays in this church basement, waves of clients weave through pantry shelves choosing food items.

“I think on a regular basis we serve well over six hundred to seven hundred people in a in a month, easily,” says Kristan Faul, operational director at the pantry. “The region that we serve is the Gateway School District, basically; there’s actually seven towns that we serve, in general. But we do have some people around the area that do come from as far as Sandisfield or Otis to our food bank even though they’re almost 45 minutes to an hour away.”

There are hundreds of organizations like the Huntington Food Pantry across western Mass that provide food to people who need it. And the umbrella agency for these emergency food providers, the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, provides the bulk of the food.

The number of people using pantries or feeding programs actually went down in the last year — by about 26,000 people. But the Food Bank’s executive director, Andrew Morehouse, says those who do still need emergency food — the hardest to employ, those with kids and the elderly — need it more often.

“We call that chronic emergency food assistance these are folks who are repeatedly running out of earned income or public benefits, whether it’s welfare payments, their SNAP benefits or Social Security in the case of an elder, and therefore can only rely on a bag of groceries from a local pantry.”

The raw numbers don’t explain why there’s an increase in frequent food pantry visitors in western Massachusetts, or the decrease in overall users. So I called Mark Melnik at the UMass Donahue Institute. He specializes in socio-economic issues.

“Economic indicators as they relate to Massachusetts have been generally positive,” Melnik says. “So we’ve seen robust job growth, decrease in poverty rate in general, increases in median household income and so on.”

But that economic recovery has been uneven, Melnik says. And that means the people who haven’t been helped by the recovery — but still face other rising costs (such as, Melnik says, the high costs of rent, heating homes), they need to access emergency food more and more.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelling Mark Melnik’s last name.

Can Online Courses Reduce High School Dropout Rates? New Study Aims To Find out

by: Kari Njiiri

A new study is looking at whether online courses help prevent high school students from dropping out.

Nineteen high schools across Massachusetts, including Springfield, Holyoke, Pittsfield and North Adams are participating in the study by the UMass Donahue Institute. The Institute’s Eliot Levine says the research will focus on online programs that are similar to traditional summer school classes.

“Many students have gotten credits that they wouldn’t have earned otherwise, or have been able to rejoin their grade level, or have been able to graduate as a result of the flexibility and alternative pathway that these programs offer,” Levine adds.

Levine says it seems likely this will be a promising approach for some. But he says there’s not enough evidence to determine whether the courses are effective for students who are considered high-risk of dropping out. And that what this study, involving some six thousand students, will try to figure out.