Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

TOPEKA — An estimated 19 percent of Kansas children live in poverty and almost half of school-age children receive free or reduced-price lunches, according to a new report.

“In terms of the numbers of kids living in poverty, we’re at a five-year high,” said Shannon Cotsoradis, chief executive of Kansas Action for Children, the Topeka-based advocacy group that today released its annual KIDS COUNT report. “What this year’s report shows, I think, is the full impact of the recession. In the past, we’ve recognized that the data didn’t fully reflect that impact. Now, it does.”

According to the report, the number of Kansas children living in homes with annual income below the federal poverty guidelines climbed from 17 percent in 2009 to 19 percent in 2010. The annual percentages are based on five-year averages.

Subsidized lunches

Between 2010 and 2011, the percentage of school-age children receiving free or reduced-price lunches increased a little more than 2 percent to 47.43 percent.

School-age children are eligible for free lunches if their families’ incomes fall below 130 of the federal poverty level. Those in families between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level are eligible for lunch subsidies.

According to federal guidelines, a four-person family is in poverty if its household income is less than $1,862 a month.

“We’ve had an increase in our free and reduced lunches,” said Doug Chaney, school superintendent in Jetmore. “It’s pretty simple, really. As the economy gets worse, more people come in to fill out applications. It’s all tied to the economy.”

Jetmore is about 30 miles north of Dodge City.

“Out here, the economy is all agriculture,” Chaney said. “It’s not too good right now because we’ve gone almost a year without rain. We’re as dry as we’ve ever been.”

'Stay the course'

The KIDS COUNT report, Cotsoradis said, underscored the need for government to ensure access to adequate nutrition, health care and programs that promote early childhood development.

“Now is the time for the state to stay the course in terms of the things we’ve done to shore up these families, things like the earned income tax credit, access to public health insurance and Early Head Start,” she said.

Only 7 percent of the Kansas children eligible for Early Head Start take part in the program; 49 percent of those eligible for Head Start are enrolled in the program, according to the KIDS COUNT report.

Lori Alvarado, executive director at the Kansas Head Start Association, said Early Head Start enrollment was low due to lack of funding.

“The 7 percent figure has been pretty consistent for several years,” she said. “The problem is funding. Early Head Start is only 10 years old, so its funding isn’t as robust as it is for some other programs.”

Both programs, she said, have waiting lists.

“At any given time, we have well over 500 kids waiting to get into Early Head Start,” Alvarado said. “For Head Start, it’s equal to that or higher.”

Early Head Start is for pregnant women and children ages 0 to 3; Head Start is for children ages 3 to 5.

Other findings

Also noted in the report were these findings:

• One in four Kansas children lived in families in which neither parent had worked more than 35 hours a week for 50 weeks.

• One in three children is on either Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program, the government health care programs for children in low-income families.

• The state’s “densely settled rural” counties – Labette, Cherokee, Sumner, Seward and Ellis, for example - had slightly higher percentages of children in poverty than more urban or more rural counties.

• Seventy percent of the state’s kindergarteners were fully immunized by age 2, the highest rate in five years.

• Tobacco use and reports of binge drinking among children continued to decrease.