{"id":7896,"date":"2018-01-19T18:22:45","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T18:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/?p=7896"},"modified":"2018-01-19T18:22:45","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T18:22:45","slug":"study-texas-kids-face-major-social-economic-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/?p=7896","title":{"rendered":"Study: Texas Kids Face Major Social, Economic Challenges"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>

A new report shows that children of color comprise 68 percent of the 7.3 million kids in Texas. Photo: Arcurs\/GettyImages<\/p><\/div>\n

by Mark Richardson<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

AUSTIN, Texas \u2014<\/strong>\u00a0A new report on the \u201cState of America\u2019s Children\u201d shows that large numbers of kids living in Texas confront poverty, homelessness, hunger and violence in their daily lives.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0report by the Children\u2019s Defense Fund<\/a>\u00a0found that in Texas, children face major challenges: 1-in-5 live in poverty, 110,000 are homeless, a majority can\u2019t read at grade level, and almost 1 million are either without health insurance or face losing coverage.<\/p>\n

Patrick Bresette, director of the Children\u2019s Defense Fund-Texas, said the state\u2019s leaders urgently need to address these problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe conditions facing kids here have a disproportionate impact on these numbers,\u201d Bresette said. \u201cAnd we continue to have some of the highest levels of child poverty in the country, high levels of children without health insurance, and those are things that are easily fixable if we just invested in the right programs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The annual report provides a statistical look at the condition of children in America, with numbers broken out in each state.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0report found that in Texas<\/a>, 68 percent of the state\u2019s 7.3 million kids are children of color \u2013 61 percent are either black or Hispanic. It also examined flaws with the state\u2019s education system, child protective services, juvenile-justice system and gun-safety laws.<\/p>\n

Bresette said despite having great wealth, Texas and the nation consistently lag behind other industrialized countries in investing in children.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen a really dramatic under-funding of the Medicaid program that\u2019s problematic. We need to rebuild our early-childhood intervention system,\u201d he said. \u201cThe opportunity for Texas to make some decisions to basically improve these numbers is going to be between now and the next legislative session and in the kind of proposals we have to see brought forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said Texas children face even greater problems if Congress does not reauthorize the Children\u2019s Health Insurance Program.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s more than 100 days now that this program has gone without a full reauthorization. States are once again worrying about running out of money,\u201d Bresette said. \u201cTexas, we hope, has money for the program through February. But it\u2019s just time to get this thing fixed. There\u2019s really no reason that this has been delayed so long.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report, out this week, examined other areas such as income and wealth inequality, housing and homelessness, food insecurity, education, and juvenile justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Mark Richardson AUSTIN, Texas \u2014\u00a0A new report on the \u201cState of America\u2019s Children\u201d shows that large numbers of kids living in Texas confront poverty, homelessness, hunger and violence in their daily lives. The\u00a0report by the Children\u2019s Defense Fund\u00a0found that in Texas, children face major challenges: 1-in-5 live in poverty, 110,000 are homeless, a majority […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7896"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7898,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7896\/revisions\/7898"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/losfresnosnews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}