Local children fare better, with notable exceptions Local children fare better, with notable exceptions (April 06, 2005)

By David Boyce

Almanac Staff Writer

Children living in difficult circumstances are easy to find by traveling outside of Europe or North America. But you really don't have to leave San Mateo County.

The Peninsula Partnership for Children, Youth and Families, a division of the Peninsula Community Foundation, recently published its annual report on the health and well-being of Peninsula children. The survey uses the latest available figures, officials said, and the results show good news and bad news.
Societal concerns

County rates are lower for juvenile crime, substance abuse, and kids dropping out of high school. The number of children with subsidized health care continues to rise. Compared to state figures, San Mateo County does better on pre-natal care, infant mortality and teen births.

But the high cost of living requires a family of three to earn $62,568 a year -- about four times the federal poverty level -- to maintain self-sufficiency, the report said. A typical one-bedroom apartment rents at $1,222, affordable on a $48,000 salary.

More children in the county are supervising themselves after school than in 2001 while the number of children in child-care and after-school programs fell, the report said. There are three children for every licensed child-care slot.

Efforts to raise the number of slots is undermined by people leaving the field due to poor pay, said Dr. Anand Chabra, the county's director of child and adolescent health. Recruiting, too, is difficult. "We don't have a magic bullet," he said.

Good health lags when numbers are disaggregated to identify children of Latino, African American and Pacific Islander heritages. Immunization rates are lower for these children and infant mortality is higher, as are teen births. Kids from these backgrounds also tend to be overweight.

Children in low-income neighborhoods tend to feel less safe in parks and recreational facilities and when walking or biking to school, said Dr. Chabra. They tend to stay inside, eat snacks and play video games, habits exacerbated by the absence of grocery stores that sell reasonably priced healthy food, he added.

"There are a whole lot of societal issues that impact on this," he said.
School readiness

Overall, children up to 5 years old in the county performed well in recognizing colors and shapes, counting, and in physical well-being and motor skills, the report said. They had the most difficulty engaging with books and recognizing rhyming words and letters of the alphabet.

In reading proficiency, San Mateo County third-graders outperformed their peers statewide by 10 percentage points, with 45 percent at or above the national average. Among students learning English, they, too, did better than the state, but by a margin of only 2 percentage points.

Overall, the county beat the state by 10 percentage points in the number of high school graduates who completed college preparatory courses, but graduates with Latino, African American or Pacific Islander heritage lagged behind.

Their completion rates were 19 percent, 18 percent and 17 percent respectively for students of color, versus 54 percent and 69 percent for white graduates and those of Asian heritage.
INFORMATION

To see the annual report on the health and well-being of Peninsula children, published by the Peninsula Partnership for Children, Youth and Families (a division of the Peninsula Community Foundation), go to www.pcf.org/peninsula_partnership.

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