Children in poverty bring more than their backpacks to school every day. They bring all the baggage of their sometimes troubled homes, too.

"They cannot leave their baggage at the door," said Jane Lambert, a retired Addison Middle School science teacher.

In 25 years at Addison, where 85 percent of students are poor, she taught children whose parents were murdered or murderers, jailed or just absent. One girl, a seventh-grader, had been put to work as a prostitute and at 12 already had genital warts.

Those are extreme examples, but even the most settled poor and minority children have issues teachers must confront.

"You can't get in their mind unless they've got their stomach full," Lambert said.

In Roanoke, where nearly two in three students are poor -- and that number has risen in nearly every school over the past 15 years -- more and more teachers are learning what Lambert knows.

"If you want to teach a child, you have to acknowledge first what they're coming with," said Ruby Payne, a national expert on teaching children in poverty.

Children from low-income homes aren't accustomed to the middle-class rules of the schoolhouse, Payne said.

Because they rarely travel or experience formal settings, they tend to have a limited, informal vocabulary and fewer cultural experiences to draw from in school. Their homes can be chaotic and unstable from unreliable income and frequent moves.

Payne said poor children live in a sensory world where body language means more than the spoken word, and life teaches them to be reactive rather than forward-looking.

School demands they follow verbal communication, use planning and follow social conventions.

"It's the tyranny of the moment. All you focus on is survival," Payne said. Poor children often feel "fated" and that they are victims. If there's nothing you can do about what happens to you, Payne said, why try?

Others recognize an "anti-intellectualism" among poor and minority students. Roanoke School Board member Courtney Penn, who is black, experienced it firsthand as a student at William Fleming High School.

"It wasn't cool to be smart," he said, though he doesn't believe it's strictly a black phenomenon.

Such attitudes and cultural obstacles have come to dominate in the mass of Roanoke's schools, yet teachers must find ways to reach all of these children.

Payne believes teacher training is the key.

"You impact the system tremendously if you educate teachers," she said.

But that's an area where the city school system has failed, teachers say.

"There has not been a systemic focus on that," confirmed August Bullock, associate superintendent for instruction. "We need to understand how to make connections with these students."

There's been "a lack of systemic staff development" in general, he said, as indicated by the fact that the job of coordinating staff development was unoccupied for two years. The job was filled in January, and teachers at Addison and Forest Park Elementary, where nine of 10 students are poor, have already received training in Payne's methods for teaching in high-poverty schools.

Even then, teachers say they can't do it alone.

The community, civic groups and churches must all step up, said Round Hill Primary School guidance counselor Anita Price. "We need everybody on board."