BY THE NUMBERS

Five years after their first joint report on the state of B.C.’s children, provincial health officer Perry Kendall and Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the representative for children and youth, released their update this week. But the report, called Growing Up in B.C., comes with an asterisk. Some key data was not available this time because of the federal government’s decision to discontinue the mandatory, long-form census and “significant holes” resulting from changes in the provincial ministry of children and family development’s information management system. Still, there are plenty of numbers worth noting.

896,750 — The number of children in B.C., which represents one-fifth of the province’s total population.

93,000 — The estimated number of children under 18 living in low-income households.

15,938 — Number of households with children that had severe levels of food insecurity, with reduced food intake and disrupted eating patterns.

112 — The number of standardsized school buses is what it would take to hold all 8,106 children who were in government care in 2012/13. More than half of those children are aboriginal.

48.2 — The percentage of youths who aged out of government care who were on income assistance within six months.

72 — The percentage of B.C. youth who participated in at least 60 minutes of physical activity on three or more days in the last week.

38 — The percentage of youth who ate fast food once or twice on the previous day.

30.6 — The percentage decrease in the rate of 12- to 17-year-olds charged with serious violent crime between 2000 and 2012.

33 — The percentage of children who are unprepared to enter kindergarten.

12 — The magnitude by which aboriginal children and youth are more likely to be in government care than others.

60 — The percentage of youth in care who don’t graduate from high school within six years.