Nearly one in five Rhode Island children lived in poverty as of 2005, and about 23,000 children – 10 percent – lived in households subsisting on less than half the federal poverty level, or $8,121 for a parent with two children, Rhode Island Kids Count reported last week.
The numbers reflect a significant increase in poverty since 2000, when 15.7 percent of Rhode Island’s children were poor and 8.1 percent were in extreme poverty, Kids Count’s 2007 Factbook shows. And while education is widely viewed as the best path out of poverty, other indicators show schools aren’t serving many poor children well.
Not only are low-income and urban children’s test scores in English and math far lower than their suburban and wealthier counterparts’ – the Factbook also shows that in the 2005-06 school year, 22 percent of students in the core cities missed more than 20 days of school.
For comparison, 9 percent of students in the remainder of the state missed more than 20 days. And while the high school graduation rate for white students was 88 percent last year, among African Americans it was 78 percent, and among Latinos, 74 percent.
“Across Rhode Island and across the country, we are losing too many poor children, minority students, youth in the foster care system and students with special needs or disabilities,” Kids Count Executive Director Elizabeth Burke Bryant said in unveiling the data.
“Yet we know that the graduation gap that exists for these young people can be eliminated,” she added. “We know that investments in high-quality preschool programs, excellent teachers, high expectations, and rigorous and engaging curricula make a difference.”
The Factbook covers 62 indicators of children’s well-being, including two new ones: pre-term births (they’ve risen from 11.6 percent in 2003 to 12.8 percent in 2005) and eighth-grade reading skills (36 percent of students in the core cities were proficient last year, compared with 70 percent in the remainder of the state).
Some of the most positive news in this year’s edition, Bryant said, involves children’s health. The incidence of lead poisoning continues to decline, and while the share of children with health coverage has declined – from 95.7 percent in 2002 to 93.4 percent in 2005 – Rhode Island is still well above the national average of 88.9 percent.
“It is critical that we preserve the investments we have made,” Bryant said, “and that we work to reduce administrative barriers and policies that make it difficult for families to enroll eligible children.”
Bryant also urged continued support of Rhode Island’s child care subsidies, which Gov. Donald L. Carcieri wants to make available only to families up to 150 percent of the poverty line, instead of the current 225 percent.
In a news release, Kids Count noted that while the number of welfare recipients in Rhode Island dropped by 51 percent from 1996 to 2006, the number of children receiving subsidies grew from 6,077 in 1996 to 14,333 in 2003, though it dropped to 12,267 last year.
“Access to child care has been a key factor in maintaining stable employment and reducing the welfare caseload,” the release says, adding that Carcieri’s proposed cut “would place Rhode Island in the bottom third of all states … for child care assistance eligibility levels.”
Another area of concern highlighted in this year’s Factbook is a sharp increase in the number of so-called “night-to-night” placements by the R.I. Department of Children, Youth and Families, which after a concerted effort had dropped to 13 in 2004, but rose to 50 in 2005 and last year surged to 234.
“This clearly is not a good situation for young people,” Bryant said.
The Factbook notes while DCYF’s caseload had held steady from 2000 to 2005, at about 8,000 children, in 2006 it rose by 19 percent, including a 16-percent jump in out-of-home placements.
Still, she said, she is deeply concerned about children aging out of DCYF care without ever finding a permanent home – as happened with 100 last year. Of those, 76 percent were older than 12 years old when they entered into DCYF care.
“We need to be working to get more permanent placements in their older years and not give up on them,” she said. Noting that Carcieri also wants to cut off DCYF services at age 18, instead of the current 21, she added: “With the over-18 age group, we have found that it is very cost-effective to give these young people help with finishing their education and give them somewhere to live compared with what it may cost later.”
Looking at the figures in the Factbook overall, Bryant said the statistics offer opportunities for change.
“Overall what we’ve seen is that we can make progress for children in Rhode Island if we focus on the data … to inform policy,” she said.
