Are we doing right by Missouri children? Mapping tool charts pandemic equity

Even as Missouri KIDS COUNT was preparing to release its 2020 data book, its writers knew everything was changing and that the stakes with the pandemic are rising for our most vulnerable children.

So now comes the “Story Map of Vulnerability.”

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The interactive and updating map will serve as a dashboard to see if we are doing right by Missouri’s children in the years ahead.

“It’s laying a baseline,” Tracy Greever-Rice, program director for Missouri Kids Count told the Missouri Public News Service. “And as time goes by we'll update it to see the actual impact of the pandemic.”

The map will provide a series of pages with county-level data, with measurements including childhood food insecurity, the number of families with children receiving food stamps, substantiated abuse and neglect cases, and emergency room visits for asthma.

“The indicators that we include in it are ones that we know of are predictive of poor outcomes for kids,” Greever-Rice said.

One of the series of KIDS COUNT maps charts food insecurity.

Food insecurity and rates of families on food stamps will mark the impact of the pandemic’s financial stress on families that lose income. And children with asthma are particularly vulnerable to having severe outcomes with the coronavirus.

And child abuse concerns rise when children are in homes under increased economic and mental stress.

In the introduction to the story map, KIDS COUNT notes that the map was initially designed with the 2020 U.S. Census in mind, to raise awareness of census-derived statistics and how a more accurate count will benefit Missouri’s vulnerable children.

But the revised map, while still highlighting importance of census data, expands the focus “to highlight specific risk factors that have made this an especially difficult time for Missouri's children.”

The new data “present a comprehensive picture of just how dangerous the coronavirus pandemic is to a community that is often too young to speak on its own behalf.”