Arkansas stuck among bottom five states for child well-being, report shows
(for Carter's Kids)
Arkansas remains among the worst states for child well-being, ranking 45th nationwide for the second year in a row, according to the annual Annie E. Casey Foundation report released Monday.
The group's 2025 KIDS COUNT Data Book measures 16 indicators of child well-being in four categories: education, health, economic well-being and family and community.
The report ranked Arkansas:
36th in education
45th in economic well-being
46th in family and community
47th in child health
Arkansas has consistently ranked in the bottom 10 states overall and in the specific categories. The state's statistics worsened for the majority of indicators in 2023, the year the data in Monday's report was collected.
The report drew comparisons between 2023 and 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread socioeconomic impacts on families. In that time, Arkansas saw a decrease of children who live in poverty or whose parents lack secure employment, but the state's rates of children in those situations outpaces the national rates, according to the report.
In 2023, 144,000, or 21%, of Arkansas children lived in poverty, only a 1% decrease since 2019. The state also had fewer children in high-poverty areas with 68,000 in 2023, a 2% decrease since 2019.
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Other indicators remained stagnant, such as 37% of children in single-parent households and 12% of high school students not graduating on time, according to the report.
The state 'cannot become complacent as the result of modest improvements,' said Keesa Smith-Brantley, executive director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in a press release. AACF is a member of the Casey Foundation's KIDS COUNT network.
'We should be particularly alarmed by the outcomes for our teens,' Smith-Brantley said. 'We're trending in the wrong direction for teens not attending school and not working and teens who are overweight or obese. And while Arkansas's teen birth rate improves each year, we're stuck at or near the bottom because of the policy choices and investments we're not making.'
In 2023, 17,000 Arkansas teens were neither working nor attending school, a 3% increase from 2019. Children and teens between the ages of 10 and 17 saw a 4% increase in obesity rates from 2019 to 2023 while the national rate remained stagnant, according to the report.
Additionally, Arkansas had almost double the national rate of teen pregnancy in 2022, even after a 17% decrease since 2019. By 2023, the state's rate had dropped from 25 to 24 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 19, according to the Casey Foundation report. The national rate is 13 births per 1,000 females.
'Those babies are more likely to be born in families with limited educational and economic resources, and if you have a baby as a teen, there are simply going to be more challenges with finishing high school, going on to college and working [up and] out of poverty,' AACF policy director Christin Harper told reporters in a Wednesday news conference about the report.
President Donald Trump's administration has attempted to withhold Title X family planning grant funds, which include teen pregnancy prevention efforts. This is one of several recent federal actions that Harper and other AACF leaders said would put child well-being in Arkansas at risk.
Nearly 3,400 Arkansas babies were born with low birth weights in 2023, a 0.4% increase since 2019. Being born at less than 5.5 pounds, often caused by premature birth, creates health risks for children not only in infancy but throughout childhood and even into adulthood, according to a 2024 Casey Foundation report that highlighted the racial disparities among children's health, particularly affecting Black Arkansans.
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Arkansas also consistently has among the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality nationwide, but it remains the only state that has taken no action to adopt the federal option of extending postpartum Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months after birth, according to KFF. More than half of births in Arkansas are covered by Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance system for low-income Americans.
Additionally, Arkansas' rate of child and teen deaths worsened from 2019 to 2023, totaling 300 per 100,000.
About half of the more than 800,000 Arkansans on Medicaid are children. An additional 50,000 children in Arkansas, or 7%, were uninsured in 2023, a 1% increase from 2019, according to the KIDS COUNT report.
A federal budget bill moving through Congress would make deep cuts to Medicaid spending, reducing the program by $625 billion over 10 years, and shift some of the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly referred to as food stamps, to state governments.
As of March, 235,927 people in Arkansas received SNAP benefits, the Advocate previously reported — approximately 7.6% of the state population.
AACF leaders said last week that they are concerned the budget bill will worsen child well-being in Arkansas if it receives approval from Congress and Trump. Arkansas' SNAP program contains a work requirement, and the state has taken steps to impose a work requirement for recipients of the Medicaid expansion program.
The federal budget bill would also add new Medicaid work requirements for some able-bodied adults. AACF has repeatedly denounced such requirements.
U.S. House GOP mandates Medicaid work requirements in giant bill slashing spending
Children who live in households at risk of poverty 'are especially likely to fall off of health care [coverage] because their parents can't meet the work requirements,' said Maricella Garcia, AACF's race equity director.
The organization is also concerned about the 43,000 Arkansas children aged 3 and 4 who were not in early childhood education programs between 2019 and 2023, AACF education policy director Nicole Carey said. This number increased 6% between 2015 and 2018, according to the report.
Fourth-graders in Arkansas were 3% less proficient in reading in 2024 than in 2019, according to the report, and state officials have made improving childhood literacy a priority in the past few years.
The wide-ranging LEARNS Act of 2023 implemented literacy coaches in public schools graded 'D' and 'F' by the Department of Education. Under the new education law, students who don't meet the third-grade reading standard by the 2025-26 school year will not be promoted to 4th grade, but $500 tutoring grants will be available on a first-come, first-served basis with priority to those to be held back in third grade.
Carey pointed out that the fourth-graders of the most recent school year were in kindergarten at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
'When they did their testing in the school year of 2023-24, that was when a couple of those literacy pieces [of LEARNS] were still being implemented, so we really can't say yet if the literacy coaches in the 'D' and 'F' schools or those literacy tutoring grants are going to impact this indicator,' Carey said. 'There's definitely hope that they will.'
Nationwide in 2024, '70% of fourth graders were not reading proficiently, worsening from 66% in 2019 — essentially undoing a decade of progress,' the report states.
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