Our little burg feels like a glass half empty, half full right now, and you can see that reflected in the national focus on us over the past few weeks.

On the half-empty side: the threat of a Kodak bankruptcy is still in the air, and the national news media keep talking about how far the company and Rochester have fallen. And last week, Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard rubbed it in with this declaration:

It's all our fault.

"Kodak Didn't Kill Rochester," said the headline on Karlgaard's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last Friday. "It Was the Other Way Around."

Kodak recognized the importance of digital, Karlgaard wrote. But to embrace it, the company should have jettisoned film and laid off those tens of thousands of employees all at once. It didn't, because Rochester's a small city, and a massive layoff would have been "a civic disaster."

So we were just too small for Kodak, according to Karlgaard. It's not that Kodak executives were too stuck in their ways to go digital; they were simply too good-hearted.

On Tuesday of this week, a New York Times article had a different view, noting that we've replaced many of the jobs Kodak killed and are leading the state in job growth. We're recovering, the Times said, "like a predigital photograph coming to life in a darkroom."

The Times account is more accurate, but I found it hard to disagree with one segment in Karlgaard's article:

"When you study the history of great American companies that stumbled and failed, or only partially recovered," Karlgaard wrote, "you see how difficult it is to overcome the mindset of your immediate surroundings. Businesses located in places where success is the norm and innovation is built into the ecology have a better chance of fixing themselves."

Ah; mindset. There was a time when success and innovation did seem to be in our ecology. And obviously, we're making progress. But even the Times' mostly positive piece hinted at a deeper problem, one that affects everything from government spending to our ability to attract new businesses and new residents: the economic segregation of metropolitan Rochester, and the poverty in Rochester's inner city.

That problem plays out in the low achievement in city schools. And in crime and violence. Earlier this month, three people were shot in one night, in separate incidents. The previous night, a 36-year-old father and popular mentor for inner-city children was shot dead.

The problem was also on full display in other news last week: an estimated 200 teenagers heading down Main Street after school, planning to either participate in a fight or watch it.

Dealing with Rochester's concentrated poverty and its effects won't be easy - or quick. Change, if we can pull it off, will take generations. But one thing's certain. We have to start by giving inner-city children a superior education. We have to do that despite the poverty, and regardless of how heavily involved their parents are. If we don't, a Kodak bankruptcy will be the least of our worries. And all the high-tech start-up companies in the world won't save us.

In a meeting with school district leaders last week, I was encouraged to hear School Board President Malik Evans and Interim Superintendent Bolgen Vargas singing the praises of Mayor Tom Richards. And Richards told me recently that the best thing he can do for the school district is to help Vargas succeed. There seems to have been a major change in City Hall-school district relations.

Richards doesn't have to endorse everything the school district does, and he shouldn't. But if he stands with the superintendent and the board president, and if he helps the broader community understand the need for the entire community to help - not through volunteer activities like mentoring but by providing wrap-around services, in school and out, to counter the effects of poverty - Rochester's children will actually have a chance.

And we won't be sitting in a half-empty glass, reminiscing about what life was like with Kodak.