Nevada given low marks for children’s quality of life

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Friday, Jan. 14, 2005 | 10:48 a.m.

Nevada earned dismal marks on a report card being released today by a Henderson-based watchdog group that graded the quality of life for the Silver State's children, an outcome that came as little surprise to educators, researchers and community advocates.

The majority of the state's failing grades, in areas ranging from education funding to its teen suicide rate, were unchanged from the last report card in 2003, said Donna Coleman, president of the Children's Advocacy Alliance, a Henderson-based organization.

The overall message being sent to children is that Nevada doesn't care about them, Coleman said.

"It's time for this state to decide what it wants to be when it grows up," said Coleman, whose group planned to release the full report at a community event this morning. "If it doesn't want to be a place where families can live, let us know and we'll find someplace else to go."

Founded in 1998, the nonprofit alliance collected data from a variety of local, state and national resources for its report card. Nevada's statistics were compared with other states in order to determine both a national ranking and a letter grade, Coleman said.

There were slight gains in several areas, including fewer teenagers reporting use of alcohol and tobacco and a drop in the state's infant mortality rate.

With 75 percent of all mothers receiving prenatal care in 2002, Nevada ranked last of all states, according to the report. In the same year 83 percent of all mothers nationwide received prenatal care, according to National Center for Health Statistics. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have set a goal of raising that national average to 90 percent within the next five years.

Nevada continued to lead the nation in teen suicide and pregnancy and 13 percent of high school students said they felt unsafe on campus, more than twice the national average, according to the report.

Overall Nevada ranked 44th in the nation in per-pupil expenditures. The state had the second-highest rate of high school dropouts, which included the percentage of individuals who had once been enrolled in local schools as well as the percentage of individuals between the ages of 18 and 24 who had not earned diplomas.

Using that formula, the dropout rate says as much about the availability of jobs for individuals without diplomas as it is about the success rate of public schools, said Gary Waters, president of the State Board of Education.

"We get a huge influx of people who come here because they know they can earn a decent living," Waters said. "They dropped out of high school before they even got here but it gets counted against us, not the state they left."

Waters said efforts are under way to better coordinate local, state and national resources available to help Nevada's children.

One of those efforts is the Center for Health and Learning, created last year by the state education board as a joint project with the Clark County Health District and Columbia University.

Since then other partners have signed on, including the School of Social Work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Waters said.

In addition to providing depression screening to at-risk students, the center will serve as a clearinghouse and resource for educators and social service agencies, Waters said.

"We need a broad-based coalition to agree that things aren't going to get better unless we launch a concerted effort to focus on children's physical and emotional health," Waters said. "The schools and the school system can't do any more than they're already managing to do with the resources they have. We need a marriage of the public and the private sector. There needs to be accountability and measures of how well the goals are being met."

Denise Tanata Ashby, policy analyst and associate director of the Nevada Institute for Children's Research and Policy, said the question isn't how to solve the state's shortcomings but why progress has been so slow.

"It's a frustration knowing there are programs and strategies working in other states that would benefit a lot of children in Nevada," said Ashby, whose group is affiliated with UNLV. "The roadblocks seem to be largely financial, that the state isn't willing to put money into children's issues."

In some instances the problem isn't money but an unwillingness to face reality, Coleman said. She cited Clark County's abstinence-only sex education curriculum as an example.

"It's impossible to raise a PG-kid in an X-rated environment," Coleman said. "Students aren't getting the information they need, so they continue to make unwise choices."