Child homelessness up, chronic absenteeism down, latest KIDS COUNT Factbook finds

This year marks the passage out of young adulthood for Rhode Island KIDS COUNT as the data-focused advocacy nonprofit celebrates its 30th birthday with the release of the 2024 Factbook — an annual look at the quality of life for babies, kids and teens in the Ocean State. 

The first edition of the Factbook, published in 1995, ran 70 pages and featured 21 indicators. As the years have passed, the page count has grown. Now, in the 2024 edition, there are 70 indicators and 196 pages worth of statistics and data on Rhode Island kids.

Rhode Island making progress keeping youth from falling through cracks on road to adulthood

“The babies who we first tracked in the first book are now 30 years old — and are of age to have their own children,” Executive Director of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT Paige Clausius-Parks said. “For a full generation, we’ve been taking stock in how our kids are doing, and we owe it to them to make sure that their children have better chances and opportunities to succeed.”

What are the children going through, exactly? Some things of note in this year’s Factbook:

• • There are more homeless children in the state’s public schools. In the 2022 academic year, school employees identified 1,739 children as homeless, compared to 1,461 the previous year.

• • From 2018 to 2022, 65% of youth living in poverty resided in four cities: Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence, and Woonsocket. Lead levels in the bloodstream of children in these cities average 6% compared to 2.1% in the remainder of the state. High poverty levels are also seen in Newport and West Warwick, and Newport, with its high concentration of housing stock built before 1978,  also showed high levels of lead at 5.4%. The highest level overall of elevated lead exposure was 7.8% in Central Falls.

• • Improvements were observed in several areas: 2023 saw a reduction in average wait times for psychiatric admission, with kids waiting around 3.5 days compared to 6.2 wait times in 2022. The state saw legislative support for matching early learning programs, known as Head Start, at the federally required 20% match.

• • The 2022 school year saw chronic absenteeism at a rate of 25% from kindergarten through third grade and at a rate of 33% among highschoolers. That’s down from the 2021 school year, when those rates were at 31% and 38%, respectively

The 2024 Factbook was scheduled for release Monday with a sold out breakfast event at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Warwick. Scheduled to attend were U.S. Sens. Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, U.S. Rep. Gabe Amo, and Rhode Island House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio. This year’s event is being held in person for the second consecutive year after a three-year hiatus during the pandemic. 

The event features two keynote speakers: Tricia Rose, a professor of Africana studies and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and Wujuudat Balogun, a senior at Classical High School, co-chair of the board of directors at Young Voices — and a recurring guest star at the State House, where she’s testified on a variety of bills. 

The organization’s 30th anniversary is accounted for with data points about changes in the past 30 years. In 1990, for instance, there were 225,690 children under age 18 living in Rhode Island. In 2020 that population was 7% smaller, with 209,785 Rhode Islanders under age 18.

The Factbook acknowledges the growing diversity of Rhode Island’s population, with children leading the way. But there are apparently blindspots in census data that can make it hard to accurately detail the state’s populations of color.

 “The 2020 Census reveals that People of Color and young children continue to be undercounted, and Children of Color were undercounted at an even higher rate than in 2010,” the Factbook states. 

Test scores show R.I. students still recovering to pre-pandemic levels

“Collecting and reporting on data disaggregated by race and ethnicity is an important first step to identifying ways to eliminate [disparities].”

Among those disparities: Black youth are 6% of Rhode Island’s child population, but in 2023 they comprised 27% of offenses referred to Family Court. That level of representation in the juvenile criminal justice system is echoed in the Rhode Island Training School, where non-Hispanic Black youth were 26% of the population there. Hispanic youth made up 37% of youth at the Training School, but are only 27% of the total child population.

Data was compiled from across five areas: family and community, economic well being, health, safety and education. Returning indicators point to everything from basic demographic data like population to more troubling statistics on homelessness, violence and neglect. 

“All areas of child well-being are interrelated and critical throughout a child’s development,” the book’s introduction reads. “A child’s safety in their family and community affects school performance; a child’s economic security affects that child’s health and education.” 

Two new indicators assess young Rhode Islanders’ attainment of science skill and arts education. The former measures fifth, eighth, and 11th graders who met standards on the Rhode Island Next Generation Science Assessment test. Across all three of those grades, the average attainment peaked at 32% in 2023. 

The Factbook cites the role of the pandemic in boomeranging scores from 2021 to 2023: Fifth graders met expectations on the science assessment 32%, 30% and 32% of the time in 2019, 2021 and 2023, respectively. Eighth graders were up to the test’s standards 31% of the time in both 2019 and 2021, then fell back down to 28% in 2023. And 36% of 11th graders met the science test expectations at the height of the pandemic in 2021 — but decreased to 31% in 2023, the same number they scored in 2019.  

The arts education metric calculates the number of students enrolled in courses like music, visual arts, theater, dance, and media arts. The Factbook shows that enrollment in arts courses actually decreases as children get older. In the 2021 school year, 98% of elementary students took some kind of arts course — but by high school that number dropped to 64%. The least represented categories are theater and dance, with K-12 enrollment rates observed at an average of 3% or less across all grade levels. 

And while state curricular initiatives require arts education, the Factbook states that 30% of Rhode Island’s schools fail to meet even the minimum requirements. Foster had zero percent of students enrolled in arts courses. But even towns where 100% enrollment was achieved were unable to deliver instruction on every kind of expression: Jamestown saw 100% enrollment in music and visual arts but no enrollment in media arts, dance or theater across grade levels.

But the kids are apparently quite capable of self-expression, as evidenced by the Factbook’s inclusion of kid-penned poems. 

A poem by Mia Malo, a ninth grader from Warren, reads: “my friends and family say that they wish they were as wise as me at 15/but how is it that i don’t feel wise at all?”