The good news: The rate at which Colorado’s kids are slipping into the ranks of the poor has slowed.
The findings, contained in the 2012 Kids Count in Colorado report, released Tuesday by the Colorado Children’s Campaign, are cause for cautious optimism — not celebration — said the campaign’s executive director, Chris Watney.
“It’s too soon to tell what this means long term,” Watney said. “We still have to remember we’ve doubled the number of kids living in poverty” over the past decade.
“We need to think about how we can mitigate the impacts on those kids,” she said.
While the percentage of Colorado’s children living in poverty remains comparatively low, the rate at which childhood poverty has grown in the state has been the fastest in the nation for much of the past decade.
Poverty is particularly troubling because it affects so many aspects of a child’s life, including health care, nutrition and educational opportunities, said the report’s main author, Lisa Piscopo.
For the first time, this year’s report compares how children in individual counties fare on a variety of measures, such as access to early-childhood education, health care and teenage-pregnancy rates.
Not surprisingly, the state’s more affluent counties — such as Douglas County — scored well. But not all the low-scoring counties were the urban pockets associated with the most oppressive poverty. In fact, several counties on Colorado’s Eastern Plains joined those such as Pueblo and Denver in recording high numbers of children in poverty, of obese children and of children living in so-called food deserts, where they lack access to healthy food.
“Two things came through to me,” Watney said. “One is how big those disparities are between communities that are doing well and children who are doing well and children who are struggling. I was also struck by how closely correlated every other indicator was to poverty.”
Piscopo pointed out that while affluence plays a major role in children’s well-being, the challenges in rural communities can be compounded by isolation from quality health care, healthful food and opportunities for exercise.
Karen Augé: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com
The rest of the report
Other findings of the report include:
• In 2010, 91,000 Colorado children lived in extreme poverty, meaning an annual income of less than $11,000 a year for a family of four, an increase of 139 percent since 2000.
• Black and Latino children are significantly more likely to live in poverty in Colorado. Between 2005 and 2010, the number of African-American children living in poverty in the state increased by 50 percent. For Latino children, the increase was 37 percent.
• Of kids living in poverty, 64 percent were in single-parent households.
• The number of children without health insurance in Colorado dropped slightly, from 12 percent in 2008 to 10 percent in 2009.
• While binge drinking, smoking and illicit-drug use leveled off in Colorado as in the rest of the nation, marijuana use among kids ages 12 to 17 spiked here, increasing from about 7 percent of teens reporting using the substance in 2005-06 to 10 percent in 2008-09.
