Today is National Child Health Day!

Here at kidsdata.org and the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, we tip our hats to organizations nationwide that are working to improve the mental, emotional, behavioral, and physical health of children.

Here are some facts about kids in California that you might be interested to know:

• There are nearly 10 million children in California.
• Of those, 14.5% have special health care needs, according to 2007 data.
• Mental health problems accounted for nearly as many hospitalizations of kids 0-17 as asthma in 2007.
• In 2008, 18.5% of California children lived in poverty.
• California’s youth suicide rate in ’05-’07 was one-third lower than it was 10 years earlier.

If you’re interested in learning more about children’s health at the national level, the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative offers a useful web resource for nationwide data.

Does your organization work on behalf of kids? Tell us how!

Posted by Felicity Simmons

Governor Schwarzenegger signed many bills into law this past week before the Sept. 30 constitutional deadline, including several bills affecting children’s health and well being in California. A few highlights:

• SB 1381: Kindergarten: Age of Admission. This bill, introduced by Senators Simitian and Steinberg, will require kids to be 5 years old when they begin kindergarten http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=18454

• AB 12: California Fostering Connections to Success Act. This bill, introduced by Assembly Members Beall and Bass, extends benefits to foster care children up to age 21 http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2010/09/governor-signs-bill-to-extend.html

• AB 2244: Health Care Coverage. This bill, introduced by Assembly Member Feuer, prohibits insurers from denying coverage to children because of pre-existing conditions by implementing federal health care law http://californianewswire.com/2010/10/01/CNW8045_204133.php

Posted by Jordan Handcox

For those of us who live in California’s urban centers, it can be easy to forget that our state, in some ways, can be characterized as rural. About one-third of California’s counties have a child population of fewer than 10,000 kids each. In some of these counties, like Inyo and Alpine, the overall population density is roughly 1 person per square mile, compared to Orange County, where the density is 3,815 people per square mile.

It stands to reason that the data needs for California’s rural regions are different than in our suburban and urban cores. A few weeks ago, I traveled to Calaveras County and heard from folks there and in nearby Tuolumne, Amador, and Alpine counties about how kidsdata.org can meet their data needs. As one person noted, they know their counties without needing data to tell them what’s going on. Still, they made clear how critical it is for them to be able to accurately measure child well being – in part, to tell others what’s going on locally.

They suggested some great ideas – offering the capacity for users to create their own customized regions of data; ensuring we offer numbers in addition to rates/percentages for as many indicators as possible; and, when viewing data, creating the ability to sort, or separate out, California’s rural counties from other counties.

We’ll consider all of those ideas, as well as others that we heard in a trip up to Shasta County a few months ago. But we want to open up this discussion to others, too. If you have insights about how kidsdata.org can serve the unique needs of rural California, we’d love to know. Just enter a comment below, or on our Facebook page.

Posted by Andy Krackov

We just added a help page to kidsdata.org, including a brand-new kidsdata.org tutorial. If you can’t find the data you’re looking for, or want to learn more about the features available on kidsdata, we recommend a visit to that page.

The tutorial is a brief video that gives a tour of the site, pointing out some of the most useful features.

Still can’t find what you’re looking for after taking the tour? Ask a question on our Data Points page, or contact us — we want to help!

Posted by Felicity Simmons

Bad things happen, and for parents, every news flash and tragic headline can make them fear the worst about their child’s safety. What is the greatest fear you have for your child? Terrorists? Dangerous strangers? According to a recent article on NPR, these are among the more common fears that parents have. But they’re extremely detached from reality, experts say, and many parents may not be paying enough attention to everyday risks, instead focusing on and fearing these unlikely scenarios.

Topping the list of parents’ greatest fears are kidnapping, school snipers, and terrorists, when in reality, the most common cause of death or harm to children is car accidents. This misplaced focus on the extremely unlikely is detrimental to kids because it distracts parents from the dangers that matter, says Christie Barnes, author and mother of four, whose work was featured in the NPR article. By focusing their energies instead on the simple, everyday safeguards to a child’s health – such as buckling them up in the car or teaching them proper pool safety – parents can take charge of their child’s well being.

Here are the top five ways kids are hurt or killed in this country, accompanied by related data for kids in California:

1. Car accidents. Unintentional injuries, including accidents, were the leading cause of death in ’07 among CA kids of all ages
2. Homicide. Accounted for 39 deaths of CA kids ages 5-14 in ’07 – and 388 among California kids ages 15-19
3. Abuse. In California, there were 97,220 substantiated cases of child abuse in ’08
4. Suicide. 383 children/youth ages 5-24 committed suicide in ’07
5. Drowning. There were over 25,000 hospitalizations due to unintentional injuries, including drownings, in CA among kids under age 20 in ’06

Posted by Jordan Handcox

What to make of the fact that here in California, we have higher numbers of school support staff (counselors, psychologists, nurses, librarians, social workers, resource specialists, and speech/language/hearing specialists) than a decade ago?

If we were placing bets, most of us probably would guess that over the last decade, schools’ ability to offer resources beyond the classroom would have diminished, perhaps even greatly.

But we’ve made gains – no doubt about that. California students’ access to support staff improved from a ratio of 340 students to 1 pupil support personnel in ’98 to 211:1 in ’09.

Despite that progress we still have a long way to go – and that may be the key take-away from these data. After all, when measured up against national recommendations, we’re not doing well in California. For example, while the students-to-counselor ratio improved markedly from ’98 to ’09, the actual ratio – 668:1 in 2009 – is much worse than the American Counseling Association’s recommendation of 250 to 1. Likewise, there are more nurse FTEs in our schools – about 25% more in ’09 than ‘98. However, California’s 2009 ratio of nurses per student – 2,035:1 – is nearly three times worse than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation of 750  students per nurse.

And keep in mind, too, that the pupil support indicators on kidsdata, while quite recent, may not yet take into account the ramifications from the Great Recession. In the graph above, it’s hard to miss the fact that the growth in pupil support FTEs stalled in 2009. We’ll check back next year to see what 2010 data tell us.

Student support staff provide a crucial range of services. Counselors offer prevention programs; speech/language/hearing and resource specialists work with children who have special needs; and nurses serve as a link to health resources and often provide basic health care and screening.

As the increasing poverty rate due to recent economic woes takes its toll on children, these kinds of in-school services are all the more crucial. Are school budgets so lean now that we’re finding it harder to address students’ overall well being? We can see what’s happening statewide – gains followed by a possible retrenchment – but we want to hear your local insights. Please add a comment below or on kidsdata’s Facebook page.

Posted by Andy Krackov