The most interesting number in the annual Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Book, to be released today, is not the one that will likely receive a lot of coverage. The one that may get more attention is the sharp increase in the number of teens ages 16 to 19 who are not attending school or working. That number is up 75 percent between 2000 and 2003, and that’s a problem, but not a large one.

That’s because the numbers of teens who fall into this category are fairly small. Maine generally has been ranked among the best in the nation for keeping this number down and, even with the 75 percent increase, the state still ranks 12th nationwide, with a total of about 3,000 teens who fall into this category and do not have either a high school diploma or its equivalent.

Further, the Baldacci administration’s children’s cabinet, headed by first lady Karen Baldacci and including the departments of Education, Labor, Human Services, Corrections and Public Safety, began working on this issue about a year ago, when earlier numbers suggested Maine should put more effort into supporting this population. Since then it has emphasized programs such as Labor’s division of vocational rehabilitation that helps young Mainers with disabilities find and keep a job.

The children’s cabinet deserves credit for seeing this issue early on and suggesting ways to fix it, but the larger problem identified in Kids Count cannot be so easily solved. It is the relentless decline in the number of children in Maine. Between 2000 and 2004, the number of Maine children under age 18 fell 6 percent, or 17,517, as the national total increased by about 1.4 percent, or 1 million.

The number of Maine children between ages 3 and 5 dropped 7 percent. The possible good news in the statistics is that the number of children under 3 fell only 2 percent over that time, perhaps suggesting that the cycle is bottoming out.

But even if it is, the number of children here will continue to decline relative to the rest of the country because of the major disparity between the number of immigrants moving here and moving to the country generally. Kids Count reports that 6 percent of children in Maine are in immigrant families. The national average is 20 percent.

A century ago, during Maine’s economic heyday, the state was more diverse than the national average, with the economy attracting immigrants and immigrants building the economy, a mutual path to growth that, with few exceptions, has escaped Maine since. Yet so much depends on restarting that growth – the vitality of rural Maine, the scale of the work force, the ability to carry the burden of state services, the character of the state beyond being a lovely place to visit or retire in.

One of the values of data such as those in Kids Count is that they provide a warning of what is ahead. The decline in population for children and the lack of immigration are warnings that deserve much more attention.