Transcript:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: There’s some good news and some bad news in a new report that examines how Rhode Island children are doing when it comes to safety, education, health and economic well-being. The Rhode Island Kids Count Factbook shows that, overall, child poverty is down, graduation rates are up, and kids aren’t drinking or smoking nearly as much as they used to. But it also shows that 28,000 children across the state are living in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold. Here to talk more about these findings is Paige Clausius-Parks, Executive Director of the nonprofit advocacy group Rhode Island Kids Count. Paige, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Paige Clausius-Parks: Thank you for having me, Luis.
Hernandez: So it’s the annual Kids Count [report] that came out. What’s your main takeaway from this report? How do you feel?
Clausius-Parks: So this is our 30th anniversary, which we’re really excited about, and we have been tracking a full generation of kids. There have been some positive things that have happened for our kids in the past 30 years. But what is glaringly obvious and evident in almost every single indicator of the Factbook is the large and persistent disparities that exist in Rhode Island for our kids, especially for kids of color. We see large disparities by race, ethnicity, and by income status, language status, disability, immigration, neighborhood and zip codes. So those remain persistent.
Hernandez: One thing that jumped out at me that I was thinking about is — and we followed an entire generation over 30 years — is birth rates are down. Now, this is a national thing. Declining birth rate, I mean, what do you attribute that to?
Clausius-Parks: Well, there’s many things that this could be because of. We know that overall, young people are starting families later in life going through post secondary education, which is excellent, which is also very expensive. Home ownership is very expensive or out of reach for many young people. And this delays starting families, which can also impact the size of the families or how many children a family can afford.
Hernandez: Overall, this was a good point. Child poverty rate fell in Rhode Island in 2022 from 15% to 11.7%. So it’s a good thing.
Clausius-Parks: That is a good thing.
Hernandez: Why is that? How did it drop? What are we doing right?
Clausius-Parks: Well, there are some things that we can [attribute] to this, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. So if you remember during that time, federally, there was a child tax credit throughout the pandemic. The entire country helped to reduce child poverty by nearly half. So that was a big investment that helped families in Rhode Island. We had a surge of funding into education. We had funding to help our child care providers that we were able to put some more money in to help keep some folks for retention bonuses. There was also money put into family home visiting. There was a temporary rate increase that we used federal dollars for during those years. But as those go away, the needs haven’t changed. And so we’re really concerned that if the state doesn’t chip in money, then we’re going to lose some of the benefits that we saw from those investments.
Hernandez: Here’s an eye opening statistic. Between 2018 and 2022, one third of all Rhode Island infants were born to parents without high school diplomas. What do we know about this statistic?
Clausius-Parks: We know that, of course, the more education that a parent has, the more likely they are to be able to get a higher paid job, be more likely to be employed, and have family sustaining wages. One of the programs that we advocate for is the Rhode Island Works Program. That’s our state’s cash assistance program that’s funded through federal dollars. The goal is to help children in poverty. And one of the ways to do that is it provides workforce development for their parents. So that includes job training and concluding two years of college at CCRI. These are all things that we know will help parents to be able to be eligible for those higher paying jobs.
Hernandez: This was a good point. Rhode Island’s high school graduation rate was up in 2023 compared to 2013, so that’s increasing. But there’s still a big gender gap in graduation rates — 87% for girls, 81% for boys. Why?
Clausius-Parks: That is a great question that needs to be explored more. In the focus groups that we have done with young people, we have not looked specifically at the gender differences. Now I can say anecdotally — this is not from the data in the factbook, but anecdotally — we do know that if we look at young people’s interactions in terms of behavior in school or some kind of disciplinary actions, sometimes males may be disciplined more than females. You know, the question is, why is that? Is it about the structure of how school happens? Is it about what is of interest to young males? These are all questions that we would have to dive into and we encourage people to dive into so that this data can provide kind of a baseline for folks to start to explore more.
Hernandez: When you look at, you know, what this report is saying, I’m wondering, is there specifically a solution you’re looking for, especially from lawmakers or educators? Specifically, how can we make it better?
Clausius-Parks: Yes, there are some things that we can do immediately to make things better. The first one is investments in our early childhood systems. One of the things that this report shows is how our early childhood educators are not well supported in terms of how much money they make. Those first few years of a child’s life is critically important for brain development. So the educators who are in their lives are so important during those early years. And we are not paying our early childhood educators wages that is equal and on par to the huge responsibility that they have. And so we’re looking for lawmakers to really invest in our early childhood educators so that they’re able to have wages that are better than fast food workers, which is what they’re being paid right now.
One of the other things that we’re looking for is our Factbook shows that we have an increasing multilingual learner population, nearly doubled in the last 10 years. And that’s really exciting because students and adults who are multilingual have greater social economic opportunities later in life. We have made some investments to help support our multilingual education, but what we’re asking for is for that categorical funding for multilingual learners to be put into the funding formula. So it’s a predictable dollar amount that school districts know they’re going to get every year. Right now, they have no idea what they’re going to get every year, so they can’t make some of those really important long-term investments that we know would really help this growing population.
Hernandez: Things are getting better. That’s at least a good point to finish with. But again, Paige Clausius-Parks, Executive Director of the nonprofit advocacy group Rhode Island Kids Count. Paige, it’s always a pleasure.
Clausius-Parks: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.