Vermont was ranked fifth in the nation in an annual report on child well-being Tuesday, down three spots from its second-place ranking in 2014.
The Kids Count report, released Tuesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, measures child well-being as determined by sixteen categories related to poverty rates, community safety and access to quality education and healthcare. The ranking was based on data from 2013, the most recent year analyzed thus far.
Sarah Teel, research director at the non-profit child advocacy group Voices for Vermont’s Children, which is not a part of the foundation, said that the report functions best as a tool to compare data between states over time. In terms of the actual ranking, she said it wasn’t worth taking the drop too seriously.
“A lot of these shifts are sort of based on random fluctuations. Low birthweight babies, for example. There are about 400 born a year in Vermont. A very small change in that number can be a big percentage shift, so a shift in this case from second place to fifth place in the rankings isn’t such a big deal,” she said.
More troubling than the drop in the rankings is the state’s apparent stagnancy in some areas as reflected in the data.
The report showed that Vermont remained well ahead of the national average in all but two of the 16 categories measured, but the state did not demonstrate substantial positive changes in any category since 2008. The two categories where the state was doing worse than the national average were in cases of teen alcohol and drug abuse, and the child and teen mortality per capita.
“I think the takeaway is that the effects of the recession are not only lingering, they’re getting worse for some children,” said Christopher Curtis, a staff attorney at Vermont Legal Aid and co-chair of the Governor’s Council on Pathways Out of Poverty. “My fear is that low income families are falling farther and farther behind.”
Curtis and Teel identified budget restrictions on emergency housing and poverty relief services as a major obstacle to improving the well-being of children statewide.
“Given the fact that most families haven’t bounced back from the recession, and that in a tough budget year we’ve been looking at cutting some of theses areas that actually support families that are struggling, that’s counterproductive,” said Teel.
“We have to stop attacking the social safety net,” Curtis said. For a decade or more, budget cuts or reductions have undermined Vermont’s social safety net, destabilizing families that rely on them, he said.
As more and more Vermonters turn to the State for assistance, those programs have less and less money to help them.
Both Curtis and Teel found the lack of progress on fighting child poverty and homelessness disheartening, but both said it was roughly what they expected.
“I don’t think it’s surprising when we live in an era of austerity,” Curtis said.
