HOMELESS KIDS

The Maine Kids Count Data Book is a mere 16 pages long this year, but it is a booklet with a bang because it shows a dismaying trend among Maine’s children. Over the last five years, “children staying in homeless or emergency shelters has almost doubled,” according to the report. But the number, says one local expert, actually is worse than that, an observation that should force state agency officials and lawmakers to figure out what is happening and what can be done about it.

There’s plenty of good news in this year’s Kids Count, which has been shrunk to lists of data this year but will return to its full size in the first year of each legislative cycle. Child and teen deaths are down, as is infant mortality. The number of uninsured children continues to decline and so does the childhood poverty rate. Some of these are the result of demographic changes or other positive steps (for instance, the number of low-birthweight births dropped along with the teen pregnancy rate) but others are the direct result of policy-makers seeing the results of specific problems, such as uninsured kids, and doing something about it.

They have a significant issue in homelessness. Kids Count reports that 425 Maine children under 18 stayed in a homeless or emergency shelter in July 2001; during July ’96, the number was 233. That number is reflected at Shaw House in Bangor, according to Douglas Bouchard, executive director of the facility that helps Maine kids who have left their homes. Shaw House served some 600 kids last year, and has expanded its programs beyond its traditional shelter and day programs to include outreach throughout northern and eastern Maine, prevention through a rapid-response, intensive service that has resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of bed nights even as Shaw House helps more kids, and transitional housing for longer-term placements of kids.

What is making homelessness worse these days, says Mr. Bouchard, is the severity of the problems suffered by the kids Shaw House ends up serving: more mental-health issues, more drug abuse and scars from physical abuse. The Shaw House policy is to first try to work with parents to get the children back in homes, and failing that with other relatives willing to help. After that, Shaw House looks for support in a child’s community – school guidance counselors, church groups – but even that may not provide a sufficient network of help. If Shaw House is seeing an increase in its numbers and severity, it would make sense that the overall homelessness numbers for teens also would be increasing, sending a warning to lawmakers that they have a serious problem, which will get worse as these beleaguered children become troubled adults.

.

Kids Count covers a lot of ground, but the soil in which it finds some of the most difficult numbers is located in Washington County, which shows up at the top of the county list for the related figures of children in poverty, children receiving subsidized lunch and unemployment. Its median annual household income, at around $26,000, is more than $3,000 below the next lowest county and is $10,000 behind the state average, as measured in 1998. If lawmakers from this county fail to use these statistics to advocate, as a group, for more effective economic-development support Down East, they aren’t doing their jobs.

The value of the Kids Count books are their presentation of reliable data on the well-being of Maine. Despite its instances of good news and signs of progress in areas where the news isn’t good, here are two issues – homelessness among teens and the chronic poverty in Washington County – that deserve much greater action in the Legislature.