Kentucky Youth Advocates has released its annual Kids Count county data book and it shows some progress in crucial areas locally and some places that still need work.
Across Kentucky, with improved rates in 107 out of 120 counties, fewer children were living in poverty before the pandemic began. There was an improvement from 25.5 percent of Kentucky kids in poverty in 2013 to 22.3 percent in 2018.
Meanwhile, approximately half of Kentucky kindergartners enter school insufficiently ready to learn and rates worsened in 78 out of 172 school districts from the 2014-15 to 2019-20 school year.
Christian and Trigg County’s kindergarten readiness percentage both dropped during that time period, while Todd County actually made significant improvements.
Children living in poverty remained about the same in Christian County, while Trigg and Todd counties made some improvements prior to the pandemic.
About 71 out of every 1,000 children between the ages of 10 and 17 in Christian County were incarcerated in the juvenile justice system from 2017 to 2019 and while that’s actually an improvement from 2012 to 2014, it was still the second-worst rate in Kentucky.
Efforts to reduce smoking among expectant mothers in Christian County have been successful, as the county now ranks 10th in the state at 13.7 percent in the most recent data.
Thirty-two-percent of Trigg County children live in homes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, good enough for fourth lowest in the state. The state average was 46 percent, down from 49 percent in the prior set of data.
Six-percent of children in Todd County live in deep poverty—below 50 percent of the federal poverty level—which was the fifth lowest percentage in the commonwealth.
Todd County was worst in the state for percentage of children under 19 without health insurance, though at least part of that can be attributed to the large Amish and Mennonite populations that don’t traditionally participate in health insurance programs that would be measured in the survey.
Click here to read all county reports in detail.