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But it's a far tougher time for other young people. In Mississippi and West Virginia, 1 in 5 young people are idle -- higher than their older neighbors. Mississippi has an overall unemployment rate of 8 percent, while West Virginia posts about 7 percent. Like most states, they saw their unemployment rate fall since 2011, but researchers caution that shift could come from fewer residents looking for work and from more who had simply given up their search for jobs. And it's not as though the challenges emerge from nowhere. Quality early childhood programs help students from poor families overcome societal hurdles, and on-time high school graduation rates often follow quality schools
-- other factors Opportunity Nation examined in its report. "A lot of times we don't want to look at data because we don't want to be depressed," said Rob Denson, president of Des Moines Area Community College in Iowa. But it's an uncomfortable reality that needs to be addressed, he said. Using previous years' reports from Opportunity Nation, Denson helped rally community organizations in his city to develop a pilot program to help students as young as 14 find summer work. "When we got the index, it really allowed us to use it as a rallying point for all of the community-based organizations we work with to say,
'Look, this is what the world sees when they look at Iowa,'" he said. Starting next summer, Des Moines students will be placed in paying jobs, part of a citywide collaboration to help its urban communities. It will help older adults, as well, because crime rates are expected to fall, he said. "If they're not in school or at work," Denson said, "they're not usually doing something positive."
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