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Cole County ranks in the bottom half of Missouri counties when it comes to children’s health and high school graduation rates. But it ranked 33rd overall, an improvement from 64th four years earlier.
Out of 115 counties, Cole County ranks 74th in the percentage of low birthweight infants, 93rd in the rate of preventable hospitalizations for children under 18 years old, 96th in child asthma emergency room rates and 90th in high school graduation, according to the latest Missouri KIDS COUNT data.
The data is published by the Family and Community Trust and the University of Missouri Center for Health Policy, according to the database’s website. Data are collected from state administrative departments like the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, federal agencies like the Census Bureau and national nonprofits, MKC program director Tracy Greever-Rice said.
“In terms of good news issues, we continue to see improvement around some but not all of health and poverty issues,” she said. “But some other longer-term trends to think through are (that) we continue to see data that suggest that both mental and behavioral health, risks of accidents and unintentional deaths, particularly for adolescents, continue to be problematic.”
Taking a composite look of economic well-being, health, family and community and education indicators, Cole County ranked 33 among all counties, behind neighboring metropolitan counties like Osage (12th), Boone (20th) and Moniteau (31st), according to the report.
Apart from comparing different counties, the report also compared data temporally. Compared with the previous five-year period, both Cole County and the state saw slightly higher aggregated percentages of infants with low birthweight between 2017 and 2021, at 8.5 percent and 8.8 percent respectively, according to the report. Low infant birthweight contributes to various poor health outcomes such as fetal and neonatal mortality, according to the World Health Organization.
The rate of substantiated child abuse and neglect cases also went up in Cole County between 2017 and 2021, contrary to the trend statewide, according to the report. Its latest rate is higher than that of Boone and Moniteau counties, but lower than that of Osage County.
In Cole County, the rate of child death (ages 1-17) increased from 12.5 to 19.6 per 100,000 people, while Missouri overall saw a lesser increase between 2017 and 2021 compared with the previous five-year period. While the rate of unintentional deaths, homicides and suicides for teenagers stayed relatively the same in Cole County in the last decade, Missouri experienced a significant increase, going from 47.5 per 100,000 population to 56.5 per 100,000 population, according to the report.
Jessica Seitz said gun violence played a role. She is the executive director of Missouri Kids First, an organization which aims at ending child abuse, according to its website.
“A lot of the increase in deaths in kids is due to gun violence,” she said. “The increases are so significant that it’s a data point we’ve got to take a look at.”
Cole County also showed a bigger increase in the rate of mental and behavioral hospitalizations among 1- to 19-year-olds than the state’s rate in the same time periods, according to the report. It went from 105.5 hospitalizations per 100,000 population to 133.9 per 100,000. The county’s latest rate is higher than that of Boone, Moniteau and Osage counties.
However, since a lot of data occurred during the pandemic, Greever-Rice said this report is where people are going to “see the most impact and the most anomalies due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
One example may be high school graduation rates. Statewide, the percentage of high school graduates decreased by around 1 percent between 2017 and 2021, according to the report. While Cole County increased its percentage during that time, its high school graduation rate is still lower than the state’s.
“I think that it is probably importantly a shift that had to do with that policy moment in terms of how kids were in school, online versus in person,” Greever-Rice said.
On the other hand, both Cole County and Missouri saw improvements in child poverty rates and food insecurity rates for children. In fact, Cole County ranks 25th in child poverty rates and 10th in food insecurity for children among all counties, according to the report.
“We’ve got reduced unemployment and there’s been some really great programs that have helped families,” Seitz said, pointing to federal policies during the pandemic like the stimulus payments to families and child tax credits as factors.
She suggested securing continued Medicaid access for low-income women for a year postpartum, as well as transitional benefits for qualified families as ways to improve child welfare in Missouri.
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