An annual report from the State Commission on Children and Youth about the status of children statewide showed Upper Cumberland kids falling behind.
UCHRA Executive Director Mark Farley told the organization’s policy council Wednesday that eight of the fourteen counties dropped in the overall rankings compared to last year. Farley said the region needs to come together and work towards a solution, specifically in education where the region struggled the most.
“This ain’t an education problem,” Farley said. “We need to help our school systems. We’ve got to help our school systems in the things we can help them with and those are the areas that are outside of that school building before and after eight o’clock and three-thirty.”
Empower UC Resource Coordinator Katlyn Ray said her team is working with families, communities, early learning environments, and health and development organizations to develop an action plan to support the region’s children. Ray said the Bright Start plan includes eight different strategies that will be implemented over the next three years.
“Two strategies are from the families and communities group,” Ray said. “This will include school adoption programs and foreign language support. Two more strategies are from early learning environments, which will include community collaboration groups with our counties and revamping our Upper Cumberland service resource website to include childcare availability sand family engagement opportunities.”
Ray said the four strategies from the health and development group are mental health awareness programs advocating for children, programs for adolescent pregnancies and contraceptive options, nutrition and childhood obesity initiatives, and a pediatric mobile health clinic. Ray said the action plan will get in motion in the next few months and be tracked to see how it goes.
“We believe that these strategies will significantly enhance the well being of our families, children, and communities for years to come,” Ray said.
Farley said it is important to understand how the region’s children are doing because they are the most vulnerable population with the least amount of control over their lives. Farley said seeing the region get worse tells him that there will be more individuals that need help in the future.
“Odds are somewhere down the road the individuals you’re dealing with through state probation, that means that probably those numbers are going to go up because of the situations that they’re experiencing,” Farley said. “(Power of Putnam Executive Director Bill Gibson), the fight you do against substance use, those type of situations could go up because you see the state of the children today.”
Farley said the chief drivers of the education metrics in the report are reading and math proficiency. Farley said the best reading proficiency rate in the Upper Cumberland is a county at forty-five percent while the lowest is in the twenties.
“Math I think our highest is a little higher, it’s like forty-seven percent, but we don’t have a single county that the majority of the kids in third through eighth grade are either reading or doing math where they need to be,” Farley said. “And they’ve always said third-grade reading scores is how they project prison cells down the road. I mean I’ve always heard that saying when they track and see how those numbers are going.”
Farley said the overall ratings showed Smith County at eighteenth and Clay County at eighty-first, the highest and lowest for the Upper Cumberland respectively.
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