Over on our twitter feed, we were alerted to a kidsdata.org report that indicates that nearly a quarter of the state’s children could be living beneath the federal poverty line due to the recent recession. From their site:
The projections suggest that as many as 2.7 million California children may live in households where earnings are less than $22,000 per year for a family of four, an increase of about 850,000 children since 2008. Research shows that, on average, families in California need to earn at least twice the federal poverty level to cover their basic expenses.
This is very much in line with our recently released report “Struggling to Make Ends Meet,” which highlights the challenges faced by the Bay Area’s working poor. It reveals that local families require three full-time, minimum wage jobs to pay for basic necessities, when measured by the California Self-Sufficiency Standard.
Kidsdata.org is a program of the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health and is an excellent source of information about how California’s children are faring. The site also pointed us to a new report by Children Now, which offers an issue-by-issue assessment on how California’s kids are faring. Most of the grades ranged from Cs to Ds. The highest grade was a B+ in the afterschool category.
