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"For seniors (age 60 and older) to be eligible, your assets must be under $3,000, not counting your home, car, retirement or pension plans. And your 'net income' must be under the federal poverty guidelines, which is less than $903 per month for an individual..."

"With the right techniques and content knowledge, teachers can transform low-income urban students into high achievers, said Lemov, the former principal of the Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter School in Boston."

"The upshot is bound to be the emergence of schools where poverty is a common denominator. People who could afford it would flee any neighborhood served by schools with a high quotient of kids from poor families."

"The board is scheduled to give final approval to a resolution calling for the end of Wake's nationally recognized policy of trying to limit the percentage of low-income students at individual schools. The resolution calls for sending students to schools in their communities."

"The Social Security Act, providing pensions and other benefits to the elderly, is signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. National health insurance is left out of the final Social Security bill because of the opposition of organized medicine and its allies."

"School choice advocates, who believe the political winds are now in their favor, celebrated the reintroduction Monday of a bill that aims to provide scholarships to children from low-income families in poor-performing school districts."

"`A cycle of poverty is ensured if young people who are parents don't get through high school,' said Patricia Quinn, executive director for the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy. `A child born to a teen mother has a 27 percent chance of growing up in poverty.'"

"Currently, the state pays for universal preschool in the 31 poorest school districts and funds some low-income children in 116 districts. Then came the economic crisis and the state's preschool expansion was shelved."

"Doheny said that the number of homeless youths has taken a huge upturn over the past year and the agency is seeing kids from all over the state."

"Countless low-income districts already face chronic teacher shortages, and firing all the bad teachers would only compound the problem. As we seek to develop better teachers, we also must figure out how to get more teachers without sacrificing quality."

"They argued against ending the policy of keeping schools socioeconomically diverse, using busing in many cases, to avoid high concentrations of low-income students."

"Given a 52 percent budget cut in counseling and student services this year, the colleges can't always help them find their way to the financial aid... 'I think for low-income... students to access any services or classes in the system is really a challenge right now,' she said."