There’s some rare good news for Central Florida’s kids — the poverty rate dropped significantly from 2012 to 2017, juvenile arrests were down and more children were covered by health insurance.
The findings were released Wednesday by the Florida Kids Count 2019 Child Well-being Index, produced by researchers at the University of South Florida and based on 16 measures of health, financial stability, education and social welfare in each Florida county.
On the whole, St. Johns County — in the St. Augustine area — ranked No. 1 in the state, propelled by improvements in economic well-being, fourth-grade reading scores and the number of children with health insurance. And, like the state as a whole, the number of kids in poverty dropped during the report’s five-year comparison, although it remains above the national average of 17.5 percent in Orange, Osceola and Lake counties.
“Growing up in poverty is one of the greatest threats to a child’s development,” said Norin Dollard, director of Florida’s Kids Count, based at USF’s Department of Child and Family Studies. “It’s encouraging to see there were economic improvements everywhere, but I do worry that when we see the figures for 2018, the trend may start to reverse.”
In Orange County, which ranked 31 out of 67 counties statewide, the percent of children living in poverty dropped from 27.1 in 2012 to 21.9 five years later. In Osceola, ranked No. 33 overall, it fell from 28.4 to 21.4.
In Seminole, the highest-ranked Central Florida county at No. 4 overall, children in poverty dropped from 16.5 to 13.9. And in Lake County, No. 30 overall, it went from 25.6 to 20.2.
The improvements came as the region’s unemployment rate plummeted and, despite severe shortages of affordable housing, most families spent a smaller slice of their income on rent or mortgage payments.
But Eric Gray, executive director of United Against Poverty Orlando, said for too many kids, things are no better.
“According to the report, 97,000 [Orange, Osceola and Seminole] children are living in poverty,” he said. “We still have roughly the same number of struggling children as we did at the end of the recession, about 97,000.”
Carla Cox, the agency’s programs director, noted the figures also ignore the “often invisible working poor households” who exist just above the federal poverty line.
In measures of juvenile justice, Dollard said, the state and local counties both saw general improvements, as brushes with the law fell from 26.3 per 1,000 kids statewide in fiscal year 2012 to 16.4 in fiscal year 2017. Orange had the biggest drop, from 31.5 to 16.2.
But there was discouraging news on other fronts, including health. In Seminole County, for instance, the number of low-birth-weight babies increased from 7.7 percent to 8.2 percent. And in Orange, Seminole and Osceola counties, the share of overweight and obese first-, third- and sixth-graders increased.
In Orange, they are now more than 37 percent of the total for those grades.
“Obesity rates are higher in some counties, particularly those where poverty rates are highest,” Dollard said. “There is a relationship between neighborhoods of poverty and food deserts, where people don’t have access to healthy, nutritious food and end up buying groceries from [fast-food] stores.”
And, already, health insurance coverage for children is likely falling. While it grew during the 2012 to 2017 study period, pushed by an expansion of state programs, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday that, across the nation, about 4.3 million children did not have any health insurance coverage in 2018, an increase of 425,000 (or 0.6 percentage points) from the previous year.
Education measures showed generally good news in Lake, Osceola and Seminole — with improved or unchanged on-time graduation rates, eighth-grade math scores and fourth-grade reading and writing skills.