Money Matters.

THEY ATTEND THE SAME SCHOOL AND SHARE THE SAME DREAMS. BUT THERE'S ONE BIG DIFFERENCE.

STILLMAN VALLEY, ILLINOIS 

They cross paths in the hallways of Stillman Valley High School, but for ReNee Hancock, 16, and Ada Estrella, 17, the road home leads in opposite directions.

Once a friend pulled up to ReNee's large new two-story house with its three-car garage, and exclaimed. "I want your house!" Then she looked at ReNee, with her styled blonde hair and designer clothes, and added. "I want your life."

Ada, however, doesn't tell people where she lives. Once, after a date, she instructed the boy to drop her off at a friend's place. She made up a story about her parents' not being home because she didn't want the boy to know that she lives in a white metal house trailer in Rolling Meadows, a mobile-home park located near a junkyard of rusting old cars.

I'm ashamed of living here, she says. In fact, her family's three-bedroom, double-wide trailer represents a step up; until last month, she, her parents, and her 6-year-old brother lived in a single wide.

Turn on the TV, and the economic news is dazzling: The United States is in the midst of its longest period of sustained growth in history. The stock market is breaking records, and the unemployment rate is the lowest it's been since 1962. The boom has created more American millionaires than ever.

But there's another story we don't see--that of people who are left behind. Across the country, in suburban trailer-parks, depressed farm towns, and urban ghettos, there are pockets of poverty the boom times have simply passed over. Indeed, as the rich have grown richer, the gap between rich and poor has widened (see page 17).

Perhaps nowhere is that gap felt more acutely than in school, where students from different economic backgrounds rub shoulders in the hallways. High school students are painfully conscious of economic status--where you live, what you have, and what you wear can determine your spot on the food chain. And by high school, the stage is already set for those at the bottom to stay there.

AN AMERICAN BOOMTOWN 

Until recently, Stillman Valley was a sleepy town of farmers and merchants. But lately, the region has been growing, with newcomers from the industrial city of Rockford, or the suburbs of Chicago, 80 miles away. Ever grander subdivisions are sprouting in fields that were planted with corn and beans just a few seasons ago.

"It used to be, people tried to keep up with the Joneses," says Gary Neurenberger, the principal at Stillman Valley Junior High. "Now, that's not enough. You've got to be better than the Joneses." At a recent eighth-grade dance, he watched with astonishment as some students arrived in a limousine.

For a girl like Ada, life can seem like a competition. She knows the rules. But she starts the game with a lot fewer chips. "People look down on us out here," she says, the embarrassment not quite able to conceal a glint of anger. "It gets frustrating. I see these rich kids who have everything. And it just doesn't seem fair."

She has heard kids at school say their parents won't let them go near the trailer park. She has heard her community, Rolling Meadows, mocked as "Rolling Ghettos." And she has heard its inhabitants derided as "trailer trash."

A big sports fan, Ada would love to play on the basketball team, but the school requires a $25 fee. Her family doesn't have it, so she sits in the grandstands and cheers. She thinks she could have made the pompom squad, since she has a knack for dancing. But all of the serious candidates go to cheerleader camp, which costs $200. She didn't even bother to ask her mother for the money.

Ada goes to the mall occasionally, but without an allowance or spending money from her parents, her activities there are limited. "I walk and look. I don't buy," she says.

For her part, ReNee feels a twinge of embarrassment when people talk about her family's money. One day at school she was called a snob. But she understands why some people feel that way. "Money is really important to kids," she says. "Everything you do, it takes money. And everybody knows who has it and who doesn't."

WHAT IS RICH?

Yet, like many well-off Americans, ReNee doesn't consider herself rich. She lives with her father, an electrical engineer, her mother, who owns a small business, an 8-year-old brother, and 10-year-old sister in a spacious, three-bedroom house in a subdivision where each home rests on at least an acre of land. Their large windows look out on a pine-forested hillside.

ReNee plays on the basketball and track teams, and belongs to the French club and the outdoor club, where students travel to go rock climbing or to explore caves. She goes to expensive basketball camps. She is the treasurer of the sophomore class. She hopes to become a marine biologist and work with dolphins, an interest that was sparked during a family trip to Sea World in Florida. She assumes she will go to college.

She has her own computer, and she wears clothes bearing names like Calvin and Tommy. At least once a month, she goes with friends to the Cherryvale Mall in Rockford, where it's not uncommon for her to unload $50.

"But I don't get everything I want," she insists. She wants a new car when she gets her driver's license this month, but she will have to settle for inheriting the family's 1993 Dodge Caravan. Her mother will get the new car.

Does that make ReNee rich? It's debatable. Compared with kids in New York City's Upper East Side or California's Beverly Hills, no. Compared with trailer-park kids, definitely. Poor is easier to define. The federal government draws a poverty line, currently $16,600 in income for a family of four. But there is no official rich line. "It's like asking who's tall," says Sheldon Danziger, a public-policy professor at the University of Michigan. "We can all agree that 7 feet is tall and Bill Gates is rich."

Some experts go out on a limb and define the middle class as families that earn $25,000 to $50,000 a year, and upper middle class as $51,000 to $130,000. Those with family incomes above $132,000 fall into the top 5 percent of Americans. You could safely call that rich, but they probably wouldn't.

Neither Ada nor ReNee revealed their family incomes. They didn't have to.

SMALL TALK OR SNUB?

At school, the poor and the prosperous commingle. The kids from opposite sides of town know each other, but socialize in different circles. Ada says she gets along fine with the girls who live in big houses and take nice vacations. "They say hi to be nice, but I don't know if they're really being sincere," she says. "I worry that they're probably looking at me and thinking, `Look at her outfit, it doesn't match at all--and look at that hair.'"

Ada's father and mother work in a pork slaughterhouse. They leave for work each morning by 5 a.m., dropping Ada's brother off at a baby-sitter. When Ada wakes up, there is no one home. She takes a bus to school. She doesn't have a computer. And until last month, she could not share in the most sacred of teenage rituals--talking on the phone. The family got its first phone in November.

BOTH HAVE WORRIES

Each girl worries about her future. "I worry about grades all the time," ReNee says. "We have tests almost every day." She gets stressed out by sports, especially just before a game.

And there's the pressure of high expectations. She knows she sits on a privileged, but precarious, perch. "I've started my life up at this level," she said, raising a hand high to signify prosperity. "What if I fall?"

Ada also worries about her grades. She dreams of becoming a psychiatrist, but struggles with her school work. It's easier to be focused on school when you are surrounded by friends with the same high expectations of the future. For Ada, doing well means swimming against the tide. Many of her friends in the trailer park have dropped out. "It is hard to resist the temptations," she says. "A lot of kids just drink or get high on weekends. They say, `Why study?' It's not very easy to go study when everybody else is doing that."

Ada also worries about whether she'll be able to afford the cost of college. "But Mom tells me I shouldn't complain," she says. "She says that a lot of kids don't have as much as we do."

BOOMING ECONOMY LEAVES MANY BEHIND

Jesse Martin, a homeless man living in a shelter near the nation's Capitol in Washington, D.C., has his own ideas about the booming U.S. economy.

"Basically, the statistics mean the Bill Gateses get the money--there's the boom," says Martin, referring to the billionaire chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, the world's richest man.

For nearly nine years, the U.S. economy has been roaring ahead at a furious pace, creating 18 million new jobs since 1993, and putting an additional $3,500 a year in the average family's pockets. The 4.1 percent jobless rate is the lowest since 1962, and computer technology and the Internet are supercharging an economy that is minting new millionaires at the rate of more than 300,000 a year.

But despite the impressive statistics, the boom has left many Americans behind. Pockets of poverty persist, while the gulf between the richest and poorest Americans has widened.

ONE OUT OF EVERY FIVE KIDS IS POOR

In 1998, the top fifth of the population earned 49.2 percent of the national income, while the bottom fifth took only 3.6 percent. Some 34.5 million Americans are living in poverty, which the government defines as $16,600 a year for a family of four. Nearly one out of every five children is poor. Meanwhile, the average pay for executives at large corporations soared to $8.7 million a year in 1997. Though the number of poor has fallen slightly, from 35.6 million in 1997, critics say the statistics are deceiving. Some groups have lost ground. The poorest 10 percent of single mothers, for instance, lost 15.2 percent of their income from 1995 to 1997-an amount they haven't yet recovered.

The percentage of children living in poverty has fallen slightly--to 18.9 percent. But, says Peter Edelman, a former Clinton administration poverty expert, "it ought to be down much more in this hot economy."

And in suffering areas around the country, the predicted surge of new jobs just hasn't happened. President Clinton recently visited poor communities in Kentucky, South Dakota, Illinois, and the Watts section of Los Angeles--poverty traps where unemployment is 50 percent or more above the national average.

President Clinton urged businesses to invest in these areas. But economists say that the largest rewards in the new economy are going to the best-educated and skilled workers, those capable of taking advantage of the high-tech revolution. Many low-skill jobs, meanwhile, have, in effect, been shipped overseas, to poor countries with cheaper labor.

WELFARE REFORM MADE SOME POORER

The 1996 law requiring welfare recipients to work has been hailed as a huge success by workfare advocates; the number of people on welfare has dropped 47 percent since 1994. But a new report shows that the poorest former welfare recipients have extremely low-paying jobs and are poorer than they were on welfare.

Sensing that poverty could be an issue in next year's election campaign, Republicans and Democrats recently agreed to join forces to try to end poverty. The plan calls for tax breaks to businesses that bring jobs to poor communities.

"If we cannot [reduce poverty] now," President Clinton says, "when we have the strongest economy in our lifetime, when will we ever get around to it?"

--Peter Vilbig

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DIRK JOHNSON is a Midwest correspondent for The New York Times.