Teachers help kids cope with families' hard times

While Wall Street is pumping, Main Street bleeds. In Worthington, a middle- to upper-middle-class suburban town of 14,000 bordering Columbus, Ohio, 22% of its students are getting subsidized lunches. That's up from 6% in 2005, when the economy was booming.

Statewide, 43% of Ohio public school students are disadvantaged, as measured by free and reduced lunches, compared with 33% in 2005, according to a recent survey by KidsOhio, a nonprofit educational organization based in Columbus. Teachers are facing the challenges of coping with children's fears about their families' struggles to survive and thrive during these tough economic times.

Read the full article by Michael Winerip in the Education section of The New York Times online.