Why Safe Kids Become Fat Kids

Just wondering if this commentary in the Aug. 13 Wall Street Journal may be the start of a groundswell that starts a movement to have kids be kids again.  Does sheltering kids create a society of adults who are too timid or take too many risks?

Just when we thought playgrounds were accident-proof — no more merry-go-rounds, high slides, jungle gyms, seesaws or pretty much anything that’s fun — it turns out that safety itself can be dangerous. A recent heat wave in New York exposed a new playground risk: The ubiquitous rubber safety matting gets hot, not as hot as McDonald’s coffee, but hot enough to scald tender feet.

The outrage was immediate. “Playgrounds should be designed with canopies,” one park- safety advocate declared. “How many burn cases will it take,” Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate asked, “before the city wakes up and acts?”

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Sex may be free, but children come with a cost we must accept

Emory University’s John Witte Jr. posits his ideas to strengthen laws that would hold adults accountable for the children they conceive.  He does briefly touch on the physical and emotional costs of parents who don’t parent, but the actual monetary damage to the country takes center stage.

So are stricter laws governing adult behavior  too much or too little?

Thirty-eight percent of all American children are now born out of wedlock, and it costs American taxpayers $112 billion per year. Those are the sobering numbers recently reported by the U.S. Bureau of the Census and by the Institute for American Values.

The Census Bureau numbers break down as follows: 28 percent of all Caucasian, 50 percent of all Hispanic, and 71 percent of all African-American children were born to single mothers in 2007. Compared with children born and raised within marital households, non-marital children on average impose substantially higher costs on society for anti-poverty, criminal justice and education programs and in lost tax revenues. According to the Institute for American Values, those costs exceeded $1 trillion this past decade.

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In a related piece, the Boston Globe looks at how society might consider men as a vulnerable class when combatting poverty as most social services and policies are aimed at women and children.  If a man is able bodied, should they be compelled to support their families?

Missing men: America’s fight against poverty has a growing hole.  Some say it’s time to pay attention to the people falling through it: men.

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2008 Kids Count on Georgia Public Broadcasting 8/10/08

Tune into Georgia Public Broadcasting this Sunday, Aug. 10 to watch Georgia Weekly.  The Georgia Family Connection Partnership’s Gay Smith and Taifa Butler will join host Suzanne Hoffman to discuss the 2008 Kids Count statistics specific to Georgia.

Link to GPB website

After you watch the show, demonstrate that kids do count in Georgia by sending your comments about the segment to “Georgia Weekly” via e-mail at georgiaweekly@gpb.org.

 

The biggest issue

New York Times’  columnist David Brooks knows that this November’s election will likely be dominated by discussion of rising gas prices and a fledgling U.S. economy. Despite this, he believes it’s not the biggest issue facing the United States in the years to come.

Citing the research of James Heckman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Brooks underscores the point that the home environment of a child in his or her first five years is a major factor in determining that child’s future: “By 5, it is possible, with depressing accuracy, to predict who will complete high school and college and who won’t.” 

Brooks understands that investing in children early leads to better outcomes later. Hopefully, his ”biggest issue” will become a salient one during these final months leading up to November.

Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.

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The future of early childhood education

What will early education look like after President George W. Bush leaves office? The New America Foundation decided to try and find out. Hosting a forum with education advisers to both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain, the nearly hour and a half discussion revealed much about how the two candidates might approach education for our youngest children.

Read about the discussion and watch the forum here

 

Counties collaborate on Pre-K classes

Georgia does not have the Pre-K slots needed to serve all the state’s four-year-olds. However, the actions of people like Dr. Donnell Carley, director of Mu-Dear Pre-School in Thomas County, are worth noting. He’s making sure all the spots out there are used.

Like many counties across the state, Grady County doesn’t have enough lottery-funded Pre-K spots to serve all its four-year-olds. Neighboring Thomas County, on the other hand, has too many slots. Fortunately, instead of letting county lines stand in the way of education for Georgia’s four-year-olds, the two counties have joined hands.  Carley has offered up the remaining spots at his center to Thomas County kids. He truly understands the importance of strong foundations for Georgia’s kids.

THOMASVILLE, GA (WALB) - Its a program growing in popularity all over the state. So much so, in Grady county, they don’t have room for the 40 children on the waiting list.   “We did request 2 expansion classes from Bright from the Start and as of this date we have not received them and I don’t think we will,” says Sandy Mudra, Grady County Pre-K Director.

Some of the pre-k programs in Thomas County on the other hand, have been struggling to fill their classes.   At Mu-Dear Pre-School in Thomasville, Administrative Director, Dr. Donnell Carley says pre-k is popular, but isn’t growing quite as fast.  “We’ve had a low rate of children. It was told to us a few years ago that its due to a low birth rate in Thomas County.”

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‘If you tell kids what’s expected, they will rise to the challenge’

State School Superintendent Kathy Cox is painting a rosy picture on academic achievement, with high school graduation rates inching upward the past two years.  The most recent statistics are due today.  The public has been highly critical of the public school system but the simple truth is that we just can’t give up.

Georgia’s top educator remains optimistic about increasing the state’s graduation rate despite the recent increase in graduation requirements.

Speaking to the LaGrange Rotary Club and about 20 guests from the Troup County school system Wednesday, Kathy Cox admitted many doubt that the graduation rate can continue to rise in the wake of the newly raised standards, but she remains confident.

“Research shows that if you tell kids what is expected of them, they will rise to the challenge,” she said.

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Georgia low on family doctors

Annual salaries for a family physician after years of study and thousands of tuition dollars is less than what a plumber makes in most parts of the country.  Overhead costs and frustrating health insurance reimbursement policies are making it almost impossible for a family practitioner to survive.

This spring, 385 students graduated from Georgia’s medical schools, but only two of them chose to remain in the state to pursue a family medicine residency. Overall, 20 students, or 5 percent, chose to go into family medicine — half the number that it was just five years ago.

“The decline in the percentage of medical school graduates entering family medicine is cause for concern,” said Kelly McNamara, research and analysis manager at the Georgia Board for Physician Workforce.

“Family medicine physicians often serve as the primary health-care providers in their communities because of their ability to care for patients of all ages and to treat a variety of medical conditions,” McNamara said.

More than one-third, or 58 of 159 counties in the state, many of them rural, are officially designated as primary-care health professional shortage areas. This designation, from the Health Resources and Services Administration, means that, on average, there is less than 1 doctor for 3,500 people. About 1.5 million people in the state are affected by the shortage of doctors.

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While the U.S. Spends Heavily on Health Care, a Study Faults the Quality

While expensive, most of us normally associate U.S. health care as the world’s best in terms of innovation.  This report by the Commonwealth Fund states otherwise, but also reveals some important steps that the U.S. can take to get better control of its systems for providing health care.

American medical care may be the most expensive in the world, but that does not mean it is worth every penny.  A study to be released Thursday highlights the stark contrast between what the United States spends on its health system and the quality of care it delivers, especially when compared with many other industrialized nations.

The report, the second national scorecard from this influential health policy research group, shows that the United States spends more than twice as much on each person for health care as most other industrialized countries. But it has fallen to last place among those countries in preventing deaths through use of timely and effective medical care, according to the report by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group in New York.

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GA Lottery achieves $10B milestone for education

The Georgia Lottery Commission held a press conference Tuesday, July 15 to hand Gov. Perdue a symbolic check for $10 billion, representing the amount raised for education since the lottery was instituted 15 years ago.

That’s certainly good news for public education, and maybe the point of the press conference was more to make lottery employees feel good.  But it was disappointing that four TV news cameras recorded the event but no journalists were there to ask questions.  One question specifically:  With lottery funds achieving revenue increases for 15 straight years and a very large reserve fund of over $500 million, why aren’t there enough pre-K slots as were originally promised?

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