Mississippi improves in child well-being ranking
Since ranking dead last for child wellbeing in 2017 — and every year but one dating to 1991 — Mississippi has ranked 48th in the latest Annie E. Casey Foundation KIDS COUNT report.
The state saw the greatest improvement in economic well-being for families, with 34 percent of parents lacking secure employment, down from 39 percent in 2010. Fewer children also lived in households with a high housing cost burden.
Still, 211,000 children, or 30 percent, live in poverty, making Mississippi one of the worst states for youth poverty. This is down from over one-third of children, 224,000, living in poverty in the 2017 report.
Mississippi KIDS COUNT Co-Director Linda Southward said the state still needs to prioritize policies to help raise families out of poverty to ensure continued improvement.
“At the same time, we know that many children, particularly children of color, continue to live in poverty and suffer from a lack of resources,” Southward said in the KIDS COUNT news release. “The research is clear that when states enact an earned income tax credit, the percentage of children and families living in poverty decreases. This policy, coupled with investments in high-quality early care and education programs, would set the stage for Mississippi to continue to improve its overall rankings on child well-being.”
The state can get the best return on investment by funding high-quality early child care and education, Southward said. For every dollar spent on these programs, the state gets $7 in return. The return shoots up to $13 for every dollar spent in impoverished areas.
Mississippi has a successful early learning collaborative program, but it serves just 2,000 children and a small fraction of the 40,000 preschoolers in the state.
The KIDS COUNT report also stressed the importance of a robust 2020 census, which happens once every 10 years. Advocates have warned that federal budget cuts to the census could result in an undercount and threaten $2 billion in annual federal funding Mississippi receives for programs to help children.
The federal government estimates nearly 5 percent of children under 5 years old were not counted in the 2010 census.
“A major Census undercount will result in overcrowded classrooms, shuttered Head Start programs, understaffed hospital emergency rooms and more kids without health care,” Casey Foundation president and CEO Patrick McCarthy said in the release.
Mississippi’s 48th ranking in the KIDS COUNT report is based on its performance in four key areas: health (47th), education (44th), economic well-being (48th), and family and community (50th).
Mississippi slightly improved in every area of “family and community” — single-parent families, heads of households lacking a high school diploma, teen births and poverty.
Teen births dropped from 55 to 33 for every 1,000 women ages 15 to 19. The national average was 20.
But it still ranked dead last in the overall family and community category, “because we’re just so far behind everybody else,” said Heather Hanna, Mississippi KIDS COUNT co-director.
“It would be helpful if we would use data to direct economic development to the areas that most need it,” she said. “I would say there are certain parts of the state that haven’t benefited from economic development efforts such as the Delta and southwest Mississippi.”
From 2012 to 2016, over a quarter of children in Mississippi lived in a high poverty area “which can greatly impact future outcomes through a lack of exposure to resources that promote early childhood development,” according to the KIDS COUNT news release.
In health, Mississippi saw improve-
ments in fewer low birth-weight babies and fewer children without health insurance but an increase in child and teen deaths. Child and teen deaths rose from 38 per 100,000 in 2010 to 40 in 2016.
The state improved in reading and math proficiency and high school students graduating on time. The number of children in preschool slightly decreased from 2010 to 2016, but still surpassed the national average.