Giving Compass' Take:

· Russell Lowery-Hart, president of Amarillo College in Texas, discusses the challenges many students face including poverty and homelessness and how colleges can provide for these students.

· What can community colleges do to help students in poverty?

· Read about helping low-income students earn a college degree.

Russell Lowery-Hart spent a Texas winter weekend sleeping outside, even when a light rain fell and it grew so cold that he forced muddy shoes into his sleeping bag to warm his feet. By day, the 48-year-old became increasingly sunburned crisscrossing the streets of Waco, applying for fast-food jobs and searching for soup kitchens. He arrived at one charity at noon to find that lunch ended at 11:30; luckily, a homeless woman shared her cinnamon bread with him.

Lowery-Hart is the president of Amarillo College, a community college on the Texas Panhandle, and he had driven seven hours down to Waco to participate in a two-day, two-night simulation of homelessness run by a religious charity, in the hopes of more deeply relating to his many students who live in poverty. “Just having a food pantry like we do isn’t enough,” Lowery-Hart said in a video diary recorded by a friend that Sunday morning last February. He was flat on the grass, still burrowed inside his sleeping bag as if fending off the trials yet to come that day. Then, in a kind of a forlorn chant, he added, “It isn’t enough, we’re not doing enough, we have to do more.”

Lowery-Hart was already doing a lot more than running a food pantry at Amarillo College. The school of 10,000 students has an emergency fund that can cut a check within hours to cover the car-repair or water bill that could push a student to drop a class—or quit school for good. The school employs social workers who counsel students through these types of financial crises, runs a legal-aid clinic, and offers free mental-health counseling (the latter is standard at private colleges but spotty in the community-college world). Last fall it debuted a low-cost day-care center that keeps its doors open 14 hours a day to serve student parents with jobs in the early morning or evening; students who qualify for a state subsidy only pay $5 a week. Tutoring is available evenings and weekends.

Read the full article about colleges and American poverty by Marcella Bombardieri at The Atlantic.