State data reveals that 70 percent of infants live in areas without sufficient licensed care.
The 2023-24 school year saw the highest percentage of kindergarteners exempted from vaccinations, with increases in 40 states and Washington, D.C. In some localities, the so-called health freedom message has led to nonmedical exemption rates as high as 50 percent.
Human services officials say more treatment options are needed to place children, but lawmakers are concerned lighter regulations will create more problems.
Hurricane Helene put rural Western North Carolina’s home-based child-care providers under an existential threat. The natural disaster exacerbated problems caused by years of insufficient funding and lack of support, causing many child-care providers to fear they won’t be able to start over.
Far too often, family courts award shared custody to fathers accused of domestic violence. Hundreds of children have been murdered. There’s much that policymakers could do to prevent some of these tragic outcomes.
Child care involves a mix of public, private and nonprofit providers. Mayors are trying to make systems easier for parents to navigate and afford.
Louisiana’s criminal justice system now treats all 17-year-olds as adults. Lawmakers lowered the age from 18 to curb teen violence, but nearly 70 percent of the 17-year-olds arrested in the state’s three largest parishes aren’t accused of violent crimes.
With reductions in federal aid, Texas ended Medicaid coverage for more than 2 million residents, mostly children. State officials acknowledge some errors but people looking to get back on the rolls must now join a backlog of more than 200,000 applicants.
A new bill asks Gov. Kathy Hochul and state legislators to overhaul New York’s broken guardianship system. It cites a ProPublica investigation that found the elderly and infirm living in dire conditions while under court-mandated oversight.
Nine schools on the city’s Upper West Side are installing laundry machines for students in need; in 2022, 119 schools across the city had washer-dryers. A lack of clean clothes often hurts students’ attendance.
Getting a driver’s license used to be a huge teenage milestone. But just under 40 percent of teenagers aged 16 to 19 had their license in 2021, a 24 percent decline since 1995.
The state is just one of 13 in which prosecutors can try children as adults without getting approval from a judge. Only 10 percent of the more than 20,000 children tried as adults in Florida were given juvenile sanctions from 2008 to 2022.
The report identified issues of physical and sexual abuse, extended periods of isolation for the children, lack of mental health treatment and failure to provide adequate services for students with disabilities.
Approximately 8,500 fewer students were evaluated for a disability than during an earlier two-year period. That means thousands of students may not be getting the accommodations they need.
They need meaningful, continuing relationships to carry them into adulthood. But the child welfare system isn’t set up to provide that.
A year after the controversial project’s completion, the Douglas County Youth Center remains empty. Even with that, there are more kids in custody than beds in the county’s controversial detention center.
Most Read
