More than 60 percent of students in Hall and Gainesville schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

That means more than 60 percent of local students are growing up in poverty.

To qualify for Free and Reduced Lunch, parents must fill out an application showing the number of people in their household and their annual income.

Based on whether that income falls under federal guidelines for lunch prices, the student will qualify for paid, reduced or free.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reimburses schools $2.77 for free lunches, $2.37 for reduced-price and 26 cents for paid.

"In just general poverty, the free and reduced lunch rate does determine the numbers of poverty but underneath that, you have to look at the circumstances," said Gainesville City Schools Superintendent Merrianne Dyer.

"There are some families that qualify for free and reduced lunch that are very stable; their income just isn't high."

Dyer said low socioeconomic status can lead to several factors in school: student mobility and hunger when a child is not getting food at home.

When she was a principal, Dyer saw students come in hungry on Mondays after not eating much over the weekend. Students with siblings at home would try to save portions of their lunch or ask for extra food to take home.

"It may not be lack of food. It may be lack of a parent or someone being there," Dyer said. "We have an abundance of different programs where people could pick up groceries, but it's getting the person to do that and prepare the meals, that's a bigger challenge."

Will Schofield, superintendent of Hall County Schools, said Gainesville and Hall County have experienced an influx of first-generation immigrants over the past 15 years.

"A number of those have students who would attend school on free and reduced lunch and are English-language learners," he said. "A second would be much more recent, with situational poverty with the downturn in the economy and the increase in unemployment. We're seeing more situational poverty, which is those who have never lived in poverty, than ever before."

Cookie Palmer, Hall County Schools' nutrition program director, chalked the rising free and reduced lunch population to the economic environment.

"When I first came here we had most of our schools under 30 percent and now those are very rare," Palmer said. "Our high schools traditionally run lower just because those kids are older and have more options or they choose not to eat. Little children tend to come and if it's there, they'll eat."

Outside the classroom, students of poverty are more likely to drop out, become teenage parents or get involved with a gang, Dyer said. To end that cycle, she said it's vital schools provide a connection with all students.

"That relationship piece, if it's not there and they don't have something to hold onto where they feel like the school is a safe place they're loved and cared for, it's almost inevitable they'll seek that outside of school in a negative way," she said.

Teaching children of poverty requires a special kind of instruction and a nurturing learning environment, Dyer said.

"An example would be in a high socioeconomic status school, the expectation would be kids would bring their supplies, their notebooks and stuff," she said. "In a high poverty school, when you're budgeting for materials, you would budget those kinds of things to purchase from the school level and have in the rooms because you would not have the assumption they would bring the supplies."

Dyer said the budgetary expenses for school supplies weren't additional, they were instead of other things a school used to buy. With many high-poverty schools receiving Title I money from the government, these schools are able to balance what their kids need and what the school needs.

"The other thing is in areas like homework, you realize you want the child to practice. However there may not be a place for them to do so or a person to help them," she said. "Teachers and the school restructure their expectation of homework and ensure they assign something the child is capable of doing on their own and provides after-school help if possible."

Dyer said teaching these students isn't for everyone, but for those who enjoy the challenge, the rewards are great.

Students from a high-poverty background are generally more self-advocating, are used to looking after themselves and have a good sense of family responsibility, Dyer said.

But all things equal, a major dividing factor between children of low and high income is their vocabulary when they enter school.

"There's some research on black males looking at the different achievement. Given the same background, same income level and living in the same housing complex, the little boys who had gone to church regularly didn't have much of an achievement gap by second grade," Dyer said. "They had grown up listening to vocabulary. They had seen other people and just listening to the sermons and the stories versus just having home and a TV."

She said the students picked up the vocabulary because they had to listen in church. A similar knowledge of vocabulary has been seen in high-poverty students who watch educational shows on TV instead of cartoons.

Parents and older siblings can help end the poverty cycle by giving young children a value for education, exposing children to new experiences, reading to them and simply talking to them, said Jarod Anderson, director of learning supports for Gainesville City Schools.

"The critical thing that divides people into generational poverty is that ability to think ahead, to plan out a budget and delay gratification," Dyer said.

A major characteristic of poverty is living in survival mode.

"The adults live day to day. There's no thinking ahead," Dyer said.

To end that cycle, which can get passed onto children in generational poverty, schools focus on teaching students to set goals.

"One of our high-poverty schools does a major field trip for fifth grade. It's open to every student and they have to pay $80," Dyer said. "If you had a meeting or sent a letter to the parents, they would say, ‘We won't have $80.'"

What teachers do instead is work with students in August to set up a payment plan through February or March, when the field trip is scheduled. Students bring in small amounts of money throughout the year so they can attend.

"Teachers need to really have a solid understanding of where their students are and to have relationships with their children," Schofield said.

"What bubbles up time and time again ... you've got a single parent working one to four jobs, leaving a child who does not have much one-on-one interaction with adults."

He said Hall County focuses on finding what students are good at rather than looking at what they can improve on.

"There needs to be a high expectation for kids whether they come to school three years ahead or three years behind, and a culture of insistence where failure is not an option," Schofield said. "What I've found over 25 years, one of the worst things we can do for children who are behind is to set a culture of low expectations — ‘If we give them enough love and make them feel accepted and good things will happen.'

"But good things won't happen. They build relationships, but they don't learn."