TOPEKA — The state of Kansas ranked 18th in terms of child well-being Monday in the annual report evaluating state-by-state evidence of economic, health, education and family trends influencing development of kids.
Nebraska and Colorado outperformed Kansas in the analysis published for three decades by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, while Kansas surpassed Missouri and Oklahoma in metrics influential to helping children escape poverty. Nebraska ranked seventh overall and Colorado was 15th nationally. Missouri’s cumulative ranking was 30th and Oklahoma came in 42nd. The No. 1 state was Massachusetts, while Mississippi was 50th.
John Wilson, president of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Kansas Action for Children, said Kansas was ranked 11th in economic well-being of children in the 2021 Kids Count report. The state’s marks in the other three categories: education, 23rd; health, 25th; and family and community, 24th. Nebraska wasn’t lower than 15th in any of these categories. Oklahoma registered the five-state region’s worst score: 45th in education.
The report showed Kansas improved during the past decade in a majority of subcategories within those four fields, including lowering the percentage of children in poverty from 18% to 15%. That left 101,000 children living below the federal poverty line in Kansas. The percentage of single-parent homes fell by 1 percentage point during the decade. In terms of obese 10-to-17-year-olds, there was a 3 percentage point improvement since 2016. The percentage of children living in high-poverty areas fell from 8% in 2012 to 5% in 2019, but that still accounted for 37,000 kids.
In the past decade, Kansas stumbled statistically regarding low birthweight babies and the proportion of 3- and 4-year-old children enrolled in preschool.
In 2019, 7.6% of babies born in Kansas weighed less than 5.5 pounds, a threshold raising the probability of developmental problems. The incidence of low-weight babies stood at 7.1% in 2010. Meanwhile, 41,000 of the 3- and 4-year-olds didn’t have access to quality early education programs — a 1 percentage point reduction over the decade.
“I don’t ever want to not celebrate success,” Wilson said during the Kansas Reflector podcast. “But I also don’t want to ignore opportunities for improvement.”
