Louisiana Child Well-being: A State of Emergency

Louisiana’s child poverty rate over the past three years leads the nation, according to a new study that attributes the trend to rising costs and expiring public assistance programs. The state also had the largest increase in child poverty rate over the same period of time.

The report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation comes out as Louisiana — along with other states — has announced it will not provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits in November, with Gov. Jeff Landry calling on Democrats in Congress to end the federal government shutdown that’s led to a lapse in SNAP funding.

See the full report: Measuring Access to Opportunity in the United States: A 10-Year Update

About a fifth of America’s petrochemical production is concentrated on a stretch of land along the Mississippi River in southeastern Louisiana. That production comes with serious risks. The area has been known as ‘Cancer Alley’ because of the high rates of cancer among people who live nearby. A new study now shows how those risks may fall on the next generation as well. William Brangham reports.

The complaint describes a child welfare system with far too few workers and far too few adequate placements for children, where children are routinely subjected to mental and physical harm. The complaint asserts that these problems, and the harm to Louisiana’s foster children, is well known to the state and has continued for at least the last 10 years, while the state has failed to take necessary action and continued to cut the DCFS budget. The complaint points to data that show overwhelming caseloads, high placement instability, lack of access to medical care, and rates of child death in the state 50% higher than the national average.

An injunction state officials have been fighting ran out on its own in mid-December. Louisiana also shut down its juvenile justice facility at Angola several weeks earlier in September, rendering the whole dispute theoretical for the time being, according to the judges.

Testimony before a new Louisiana legislative panel Tuesday ripped the Band-Aid off the state’s ailing mental health care system. The bulk of the discussion centered on the maze patients in the Medicaid system, which provides care for 39% of Louisiana residents according to the state health department, must navigate for treatment, and how that care is often inadequate, interrupted or not covered by the government-provided insurance.

Approximately 35% of the 50,600 people removed from Louisiana’s Medicaid health insurance coverage in July were children, according to information the state Department of Health provided this week.

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Most returning appear to be children, she said. Families may have realized their children were booted from Medicaid when they went to the doctors for vaccines, sports medicine evaluations or other pre-school checkups and signed them back up again.

LeBlanc also said schools work closely with the health department to make sure children who qualify for Medicaid get enrolled at the beginning of the school year.

The state must retroactively reinstate the benefits of any person who is dropped from Medicaid but still qualifies for it within 90 days of their initial disenrollment. This means a child who inadvertently was removed from Medicaid but winds up in a doctor’s office or emergency room within three months will still be able to get health care coverage.

“Louisiana’s poor ranking in children’s economic wellbeing impacts every other area of child wellbeing,” Teresa Falgoust, director of data and research at the Agenda for Children, told Axios.

Business groups are strong advocates for early childhood education, in part because of the long-term benefits; dollar for dollar, quality programs are one of the best investments we can make in future workforce readiness. They see a shorter-term benefit as well, because parents need child care in order to go to work.

In 2019, a bipartisan commission unanimously approved a plan to address the lack of high-quality, affordable child care for vulnerable families, Investing in Our Future: LA B to 3. However, that plan has not been fully implemented. Now, the state continues to serve a fraction of in-need children, aged birth to three, while Louisiana’s kindergarten readiness rate hovers around 40 percent.

The operators of a group home for minors with disabilities has filed a federal lawsuit against Pointe Coupee Parish over its recently enacted ban on such homes. Believe Therapeutic Group Home LLC filed its complaint in the US District Court based in Baton Rouge on Friday.

Clayton, Stassi, West Baton Rouge Sheriff Mike Cazes and Pointe Coupee Sheriff Rene Thibodeaux all want a detention facility built on the westside, but getting that done is not an easy task. Juvenile detention centers require different services and staff than adult jails, such as teachers and mental health experts.”

Senate Bill 137 received unanimous support this week in the State Senate and now moves to Louisiana’s House of Representatives.

The ombudsman would review complaints about the treatment of children in state care and brief the Legislature annually on their findings. Their job would entail recommending changes to how Louisiana’s state agencies serve children and releasing a report every two years on the conditions of children in confinement in state-run facilities.

“We need more workers,” Scott said at the first meeting. “We are terribly understaffed. State law says we must have one worker per eight kids, and we can’t keep them. We are probably 10 short in detention and 25 to 30 short overall.”

Ultimately, more effective government remains elusive but vital in responding — whether through DCFS or police work, along with nonprofit organizations and faith communities — to what threatens our state’s most vulnerable residents, our young people.

Louisiana 211 is crewed by 120 people in area offices throughout the state. The network maintains a computerized database of over 15,000 statewide resources and services that is constantly updated: these include nonprofit agencies, faith-based organizations and government agencies.

Rural homicides in Louisiana have risen dramatically in recent years to at 17 killings per 100,000 people as of 2020, per CDC data — three times the national rural homicide rate.

States where legislatures have not raised the minimum above the federal $7.25 an hour include Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina. All have child poverty rates of 20% or higher, according to U.S. Census data analyzed by 24/7 Wall Street, a financial news site. Mississippi has the highest child poverty rate in the United States, at 27.6%, with Louisiana following at 26.3%.

Louisiana last raised its minimum wage in 2008, the year before the federal rate increased to $7.25 an hour.

By presenting “smoothed data” without qualification, LDH essentially halved the actual number of asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits in any given year in its dataset, said Boothe, who’s now retired but works on a volunteer basis with the environmental groups 350 New Orleans and Climate Reality.

Gov. John Bel Edwards has announced he will launch a second state investigation – one that includes the Department of Children and Family Services and the Office of Juvenile Justice – into Ware Youth Center, a large juvenile detention facility in Coushatta.

Ware’s staff allegedly engaged in sexual abuse, choking and other physical violence against incarcerated youth in its care over a period of 25 years, according to a report from The New York Times.

This week, Interim Superintendent Rebecca Johnson was made aware of a letter from the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. Addressed to the secretaries of LDEQ and the Louisiana Department of Health, the 56-page letter suggested the departments have allowed air pollution from the nearby Denka Performance Elastomer facility to put a predominantly Black community at risk of adverse health impacts.

Facing a chronic shortage of workers, Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice is providing more flexibility to job applicants who want to work as guards in the state’s youth incarceration facilities, including when it comes to screening for the threat of pedophilia.
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Instead, some applicants are being allowed to move forward even if they fail that test as long as they can pass a four-hour, one-on-one assessment with a psychologist.

Concerns are growing over the treatment of juvenile inmates in Louisiana. In July, Governor John Bel Edwards announced inmates at the Bridge City Center for Youth will be moved to a facility at the state prison, Angola. But youth justice advocates say that will only make things worse.

A new administrator for the state Office of Juvenile Justice suggested Monday that Louisiana prosecutors need to consider charging more underage teenagers with adult crimes. His stance has rankled child welfare advocates who believe people under 18 should not face adult prison sentences that can last decades.

The Louisiana Supreme Court could soon weigh in on whether it is legal for cities and parishes throughout the state to send incarcerated juvenile defendants to detention facilities across state lines — a practice that has been going on for years, but one that some attorneys and youth advocates say violates state law and goes against best practices.

A Louisiana school system is banning paddling students, saying the time to use corporal punishment in the classroom is long past.

The St. Landry Parish School Board voted unanimously Thursday to specifically prohibit corporal punishment in the district’s police manual, the Daily World of Opelousas reported.

House Bill 495, authored by. Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-Metairie, would require Louisiana public schools teach sixth- through 12th-graders about suicide prevention, student safety, violence prevention and social inclusion. The bill would also give schools the chance to create student-led clubs based around suicide prevention.

Louisiana holds about 350 youths, more than 80% of whom are Black, in secure facilities; it has promised for decades to move its lockups toward a more therapeutic model. But like many states, it has failed to fully fund or commit to the new approach. That, combined with a debilitating staff turnover caused by low pay and dangerous conditions, has meant staff members haven’t been properly trained to prevent the violence and chaos that has erupted.

While the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services inspects and licenses juvenile group homes and detention facilities where youths are held when they’re first accused of crimes, only the Office of Juvenile Justice has authority over secure care facilities like St. Martinville where teens are placed after they’ve been sentenced. A legislative task force described this “glaring gap in oversight” in 2019, recommending that an outside agency inspect the facilities. But nothing has changed.

Commission members also complained that the Legislature is not standing by its commitment to offer matching funds for local communities that raise dollars for child care.

A recent study shows Louisiana continues to have one of the highest levels of food insecurity in the country. Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America says more than half a million Louisianans, including one in five children, struggle with hunger.

Public defenders are still scrambling to locate children who were being held at Louisiana detention centers when Hurricane Ida hit last month. Many of these youths were evacuated with no information given to their local defenders, who are now uncertain as to where they are being held.

Putting the interests of wealthy people and corporations ahead of low-income families is what’s landed our children in 48th place. If our elected officials want to get serious about improving Louisiana’s economy, they should focus on making strategic investments in our future through investing in our children.

Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Minnesota topped the state results at the first-, second- and third-ranked states. It’s no secret why they’re doing so much better than us. These states invest more in their children, and they’ve done so for many years.

Thirty-six of every 100,000 Louisiana children died in 2019 compared to 25 of 100,000 nationwide. The Kids Count report says the child death rate “reflects a broad array of factors: physical and mental health; access to health care; community issues; use of safety practices; and, especially for younger children, the level of adult supervision.”

In the decade leading up to the deadly coronavirus pandemic, the well-being of Louisiana’s children remained near the bottom of the nation, showing limited improvement even as the nation as a whole improved by almost every measure, including a 5 percentage point decline in the number of children living in poverty.