There’s still time for households that didn’t get their census forms in by April 1 to be counted. From May into early July, census workers will be following up with house-to-house visits and visits to special environments, such as nursing homes, college dorms and homeless shelters, to make sure no one is left out.
With times as tough as they are, it’s especially important for everybody to be part of the tally—including people for whom getting in touch with the census may not be a high priority at the moment because they’re coping with foreclosure or being flooded out.
Being counted is important because money, as well as the information that helps us know ourselves as communities and as a country, is riding on the results. Funding for a host of vital programs is distributed based on census data: Medicaid, community development block grants, transportation, special ed grants, unemployment insurance and more. Some $4 trillion is up for grabs in the decade before the next census; the more people Massachusetts shows it has, the more it gets. On the down side, a Brookings Institution study found that for every 100 people who weren’t counted in 2000, states lost $143,800 a year in funds for such programs.
Getting people counted in this census is very important for another reason: the fact that Massachusetts faces the possibility of losing a representative in Congress because the state is lagging behind other states in population growth. Losing a representative is bad enough in itself; it’s even more dismaying if you look at the last 50 years, when Massachusetts’ House delegation has shrunk from 14 to 10 (14 to 12 in 1960, 12 to 11 in 1980, 11 to 10 in 1990).
This makes two kinds of populations here that are especially difficult to count even more important to bring into the census’ fold: non-English-speakers and college students. Secretary of State Bill Galvin has noted that an accurate count is extremely important, and elusive, in Springfield—because a population of 150,000 is a threshold figure for certain types of aid, and because Springfield has Asian, Russian, East European and Latino immigrants who are easy to miss.
And the Valley as a whole is lagging in population growth, but has many thousands of students, another group apt to fall through the cracks. Let’s get them tallied. We may lose a rep for reasons beyond our control, but let’s not let it be for lack of a full, accurate count.
