Alabama is the seventh-worst state in the country for children.
Education, health care, opportunity, poverty, nutrition — we stink at absolutely all of them, according to the most current edition of the “Kids Count” Data Book from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Oddly, there was no ranking for placing subjectively questionable books on higher shelves in libraries. We would have aced that one, I feel certain.
As it is, though, the researchers who put together their study chose to focus (stupidly, maybe the book nazis would suggest) on things like hunger and school performance and access to health care. In those categories, Alabama, once again, scored in the pitiful percentile.
We outpaced the nation in children lacking health insurance and teen obesity rates. Oh, and here’s a particularly awful one: while the national death rate per 100,000 children and teens was 29, Alabama’s rate was 41.
I’m from Alabama — where 82 percent of eighth graders are below grade level in math — so there’s absolutely no chance I could accurately convey the percentage difference between 41 and 29, but I know it’s a lot. And I also know, because I checked, that not a single one of those Alabama teen deaths was caused by a risque book, a drag queen or a transgender athlete.
Oddly, though, in the most recent legislative session, where our Republican-dominated Legislature is always so happy to tell you about their “pro-family” approach to governance, there was oodles of time spent on those last three and really not very much at all on the things that contributed to those other numbers.
We didn’t expand Medicaid or provide any improved access to health care for children at all. We did manage to ban bump stocks, but we did nothing at all to stop the river of guns flowing into the hands of young men. And when it comes to education — the one thing that could improve all of these stats — we sucked hundreds of millions of dollars away from the schools that serve 90 percent of Alabama’s children and instead gave that money to rich people sending their kids to private schools.
Pro family.
That same Legislature also pushed legislation that would require abstinence-only sex education and allow parents to opt their children out of sex ed classes. A bill a year ago would have prevented teaching students how to properly use contraception.
Alabama’s teen birth rate per 1,000 is 20. The national average is 13.
You know what’s truly wild?
It’s been this way for years.
We’ve been stinking up the joint for decades when it comes to education rankings and health care for our poorest citizens, particularly children. The conservative, anti-progress approach has left us all dying faster, suffering more and learning less.
Every year, that Legislature walks into the State House, makes grand promises of protecting families and defending children, and then it does everything but those things. And y’all keep falling for it because they keep wrapping their BS in the Bible and the flag.
I dream of the day you realize that the drag queen reading a Toni Morrison book is far, far less of a threat to your family than an Alabama Republican lawmaker in a suit and tie passing an acronym-title tax bill. But that day never seems to come.
Instead, every year, VOICES for Alabama Children promotes this study — which simply analyzes data from a variety of sources and compares it transparently to the same data from other states — and you get an up-close look at how we’re failing our children when compared to other states. And every year, y’all yawn and go back to talking about transgender athletes and the border.
I’m starting to get the idea that your focus has less to do with wanting to protect the children and a whole lot more to do with justifying your own biases and hatred.
Because if you actually cared about these kids, you’d do something about the things that have been killing them for years now.
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