Massachusetts

"`We know that there are more low-income people who have worked outside the mainstream, either as nannies or cleaners or landscapers,' she said. `So there's a great need to help the lowest income elders to get the assistance they need.'"

"Governor Deval Patrick proposed a $32.3 billion annual spending plan yesterday that would eliminate 240,000 free and subsidized lunches for senior citizens, apply the sales tax to candy and soda, and close a prison in Norfolk while boosting spending on education to unprecedented levels."

"Mayor Thomas M. Menino plans to call this evening for a major overhaul of Boston's faltering vocational high school, seeking broad authority to create a job training institution that aims to help teenagers and adults climb out of poverty and into the middle class."

"Other suggestions that have received strong support include excluding students living in college dorms and prison inmates from the population counts when calculating a town's per-capita income and eliminating or altering provisions in the current funding program that allow school districts to keep their level of grant funding even when their per-student share should be decreasing, if their poverty rate or other factors change."

"But they worry that doing so may jeopardize their standing as advocates for the children who need them most, many of whom are black and Latino, from low-income families, and, in many cases, still learning English."

"Those women do not go to Pine Manor anymore. Fifteen years ago, as enrollment at many women's schools dwindled, the college assumed a new identity to attract students: It focused almost all its recruiting on low-income women who showed perseverance, if not perfect grades."