Virginia loses ground in latest child well-being ranking

Virginia fell one rung on the latest national ranking of child well-being, with infant mortality pegged as one of the state's toughest challenges.

The commonwealth ranked 15th among the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico in the report released today. That was a step down from its position last year in the annual Kids Count study that has tracked 10 indicators since 1990.

Child advocates say the overall ranking is still good, but they expressed concern about the three indicators in which Virginia did worse than before, particularly infant mortality. The state slipped from ranking 31st in the country last year on that indicator to 35th in this report.

The state also showed poorer scores on the rate of low-birthweight babies and children in single-parent families.

Virginia made improvements in child and teen death rates, teen birth rate, high school dropouts, teens not attending school or working and children living in poverty.

"It's puzzling to me why a state with our economic climate would rank 35th on infant mortality," said John Morgan, executive director of Voices for Virginia's Children, a child advocacy group based in Richmond. "We need to redouble our efforts to understand why that is."

Last year, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine allocated $100,000 grants to each of 10 cities to find ways to reduce infant mortality. Half of those cities, selected on the basis of the highest number of deaths, were in Hampton Roads: Chesapeake, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach.

Virginia Deputy Health Commissioner Jeff Lake said the 10 communities have focused their grants along five themes: Determining which women in the communities are at highest risk; increasing awareness of the signs of premature labor; educating parents about the best sleep practices for infants, such as placing them on their backs, in their own cribs; coordinating private and public health-care providers; and improving women's health through folic acid supplements, insurance coverage and better transportation to health sites.

For instance, in Chesapeake, money was used to help women sign up for federal and state medical insurance, for transportation to prenatal appointments and to pay for pregnancy tests.

The infant mortality statistics used in the Kids Count study were collected from 2000 through 2005. The most recent year of statistics, 2006, did show improvements in the state. Lake said it can take years, though, for public policy changes to have an effect. "We don't expect to see dramatic improvements from year to year, but we'd like to see a downward trend."

In addition to 10 indicators of child well-being, this year's Kids Count study highlights juvenile justice. Virginia has a rate of 107 detained and committed youths in custody per 100,000 youths ages 10 to 15, which is less than the country's rate of 125.

The state's rate of minority youths in custody was higher - at 4 minorities to 1 white - than the country's ratio of 3-to-1.

The Virginia Coalition of Juvenile Justice noted in a statement on the study that 61 percent of youths detained in Virginia were nonviolent offenders, a group the coalition believes would be better served in community programs such as drug rehabilitation.

The study also showed that the percentage of children from immigrant families increased by 29 percent in Virginia between 2001 and 2006. Seventeen percent of the state's children were from immigrant families in 2006, compared with 22 percent for the nation as a whole.

The Kids Count study is a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national organization that advocates for disadvantaged children.

 Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com