California's Children

Chronic absenteeism: 7M+ poor school kids don't show up

May 23, 2012:  As many as 15% of K-12 students are chronically absent each year, estimate researchers at John Hopkins University (JHU) for a study commissioned by the Get Schooled Foundation, a non-profit that promotes initiatives to get youth more involved in their education.  

Chronic absenteeism is missing 10% or one month of the school year. (Standard is up to 5 absences.) Authors of the study, Robert Balfanz, at left, research scientist, and Vaughan Byrnes, from JHU's Center for Organization of Schools, put forth the argument that because data collection on chronic absentism is mandated by only a few states, the problem is not addressed -- an omission that undermines any reform efforts in public education. 

Richard Perez-Pena, reporting for the New York Times:

“There are so many efforts at school reform, but what people overlook is that none of them work if the kids don’t show up,” said Marie Groark, executive director of Get Schooled. Balfanz and Byrnes found that only six states — Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island — measure chronic absenteeism, as do some local systems, including New York City and Oakland, Calif. Based on data from those states, they estimated that in a given school year, nationwide, more than 10% percent and possibly as many as 15% of students miss at least one day in 10.

From the study [emphases ours]:

 If we apply these metrics to the roughly 50 million of enrolled grade school students, we estimate that 5-7.5 million students are not attending school on a regular basis. Half of these students are chronically absent in multiple years. The available evidence also tells that 25% of chronically absent students are severely chronically absent, which means missing more than 2 months of school each year.

Chronic absenteeism is most prevalent in low-income students. The youngest and oldest tend to have the highest rates...with students attending most regularly 3rd through 5th grade... it begins to rise in middle school and continues climbing through 12th grade, with seniors often having the highest rates of all. The data also suggests that it is concentrated in relatively few schools... with 15% of schools in Florida, for example, accounting for at least half of all chronically absent students. 

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.

AB 2109 on vax exemption passes Assembly

UPDATE, May 11, 2012: The Sacramento Bee is reporting that AB 2109 (Pan, D-Sacramento), the bill that would require parents who want to opt of the required vaccinations for their children to obtain a physician's statement affirming the parents were given full information on the risks involved, passed the Assembly, 44-19, on Thursday; AB 2109 now heads to the Senate. If signed into law, the bill will go into effect in July 2013.

Previously reported:

March 22, 2012:  AB 2109, introduced on February 23, was referred March 12 to the Assembly Committee on Health. The proposed legislation, which intends to amend the state Health and Safety Code section 120365, was introduced by Assembly member Richard Pan (D-Sacramento), below, who is a pediatrician; and was co-authored by Senator Lois Wolk (D-Stockton) and Assembly member Felipe Fuentes (D-San Fernando Valley). AB 2109 seeks to strengthen exsiting law that:

...prohibits the governing authority of a school or
other institution from unconditionally admitting any person as a
pupil of any private or public elementary or secondary school, child
care center, day nursery, nursery school, family day care home, or
development center, unless prior to his or her first admission to
that institution he or she has been fully immunized against various
diseases, as specified.

In a nutshell: Parents who "file with the governing authority a letter or affidavit stating that [vaccinations are] contrary to his or her beliefs "will, under the language of the proposed law, also require the letter to be accompanied by a "written statement signed by a health care practitioner, and a form, signed by the parent/guardian" that indicates he or she received [information about the health care risks of not being vaccinated] from the health practitioner.

Pesticide exposure in utero correlates with lower IQ

May 3, 2012: Exposure in utero to Chlorpyrifos (CPF), a pesticide made by Dow AgroSciences, routinely used on grain, cotton, fruit, nut and vegetable crops, has a "measurable effect" on brain structure, including enlargement of specific brain regions that deal with social cognition, language comprehension, sensory and motor processing, and disruption of normal gender differences in the brain; these structural changes are also correlated with lower IQ, according to a case-control children's study by researchers from the Columbia University Center for Children's Environmental Health in New York City.

Crystal Phend, of MedPage Today reported on the study, published online April 30, 2012, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Registered for use since 1965, CPF (common names: Dursban, Tricel, Brodan, Detmol UA, Dowco 179, Empire, Eradex, Lorsban, Paqeant, Piridane, Scout, Stipend), a broad spectrum organophosphate considered "moderately toxic" by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is used to control cutworms, corn rootworms, cockroaches, grubs, flea beatles, flies, termites, fire ants, mosquitos, and lice.  The  EPA banned it for residential use in 2001, but it is still used widely in commercial and agricultural locations.

From the EPA's Human Health Risk Assessment (2000):

The critical exposure commodity (CEC) analysis indicated that residues on fresh apples were the major contributor to dietary exposure estimates for children 1-6 years old at the 99.9th percentile exposure. Residues on whole tomatoes and grapes were the next major contributors to exposure.

Lead researcher Virginia A. Rauh ScD, above, compared, with her team, the MRI scans of 40 children, 20 with high exposure levels to CPF and 20 with low exposure.

"Our findings indicate that prenatal CPF exposure, at levels observed with routine (nonoccupational) use and below the threshold for any signs of acute exposure, has a measurable effect on brain structure," they wrote.

The changes are likely to be irreversible based on their persistence into childhood and findings in animal studies, the researchers noted.

The high-exposure group showed significant enlargement of brain regions -- frontal, parietal, and lateral temporal -- that "subserve higher-cognitive functions." (attention and language comprehension, sensory and motor processing, social cognition)

With regard to normal sexual differentiation of the brain, there were problems, too. Areas of the brain that are usually larger in females compared with males were not in the children with high exposure...and the normal male-larger-than-female difference of the right mesial superior frontal gyrus was also reversed.

The new results suggest that the EPA's exposure limits may not be stringent enough to protect brain development in children, Rauh's group argued.

The high-exposure group had CPF levels of 4.39 pg/g or greater in their umbilical cord blood, which is not unusually high; for e.g., the background serum concentration in one blood bank during the same time period was twice as high at an average of 9 pg/g.

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.

93% increase in unaccompanied kids crossing the border

April 28, 2012:  From October 2011 through March 5, 2012, 5,252 kids landed in U.S.custody -- unacompanied minors making illegal border crossings through "south Texas scrublands" and other points of entry  (at left, the wall at Campos, California) -- a 93% increase in child immigration, according to a story from the Associated Press posted today by Christopher Sherman in McAllen, Texas.

[The] unprecedented surge of children ...has sent government and nonprofit agencies scrambling to expand their shelter, legal representation and reunification services. On any given day this year, the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement has been caring for more than 2,100 unaccompanied child immigrants.

The influx came to light last week when 100 kids were taken to Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio for temporary housing. It was the first time the government has turned to the Defense Department - now, 200 boys and girls younger than 18 stay in a base dormitory.

The children are cared for at Lackland by the Dept. of Health and Human Services, with aid from private nonprofits. On a tour conducted Thursday for the press, for reasons of transparency, the HHS explained, it was said that 88% of the detained children "end up with family members."

 "What we always strive for is the children be held in the least restrictive setting possible and that they be held for the shortest time possible," said, Wendy Young, executive director of Kids in Need of Defense, a nonprofit that finds legal representation for immigrant children.

 Once they're placed with family members, sponsors try to provide counsel so the children can pursue legal status through options such as asylum and visas for victims of crime and neglect, she said.

All of the 200 children are 17 or younger, [HHS spokesman Jesse] Garcia said. The youngest is 9. HHS generally takes custody of 7,000 to 8,000 children a year but had to find housing for 5,000 since October. Most are from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico....Garcia said HHS has good reason for stringent security measures.

 "The children, some of them are victims of crimes," he said. "They escaped gangs. They were victims of human trafficking. So there is a risk that any image of them could become public, and these people that are looking for them could recognize them and know that they're in out custody."

While the issue of unaccompanied minors arriving in the U.S. isn't new, the scale of the recent increase is. From October 2011 through March, 5,252 kids landed in U.S. custody without a parent or guardian - a 93 percent increase from the same period the previous year, according to data released by the Department of Health and Human Services. In March alone, 1,390 kids arrived.

"The whole community right now is in triage mode," said Wendy Young, executive director of Kids in Need of Defense, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that matches pro bono attorneys with unaccompanied minors navigating the immigration system. "It's important that the resources and the capacity meet the need, and we're not quite there yet."

 

Kids on farms: US Labor Dept. gives up child labor revisions

UPDATE, April 28, 2012: Evidently, enough already for the U.S. Department of Labor: last Thursday, the department, which had been conducting public comments for months on its overdue (first in 40 years) revision to the child labor laws, announced it was withdrawing from the fray, which has pitted the vocational education/family farm needs against the advocates for an underage rural poor and migrant labor force -- two different populations, each with legitimate concerns and needs, and for whom no legislative language could reconcile.

In its official statement, the Department of Labor said the “decision to withdraw this rule — including provisions to define the ‘parental exemption’ — was made in response to thousands of comments expressing concerns about the effect of the proposed rules on small family-owned farms. Instead, the Departments of Labor and Agriculture will work with rural stakeholders – such as the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Farmers Union, the FFA, and 4-H – to develop an educational program to reduce accidents to young workers and promote safer agricultural working practices.”

See full story as covered here, below.

UPDATE, April 23, 2012:  The upgrade to the child labor laws -- the first in 40 years -- from the U.S. Department of Labor, is generating a "war of words," that, as reporter Brian Mann of North Country Public Radio [New York's Hudson Valley] put it, "could reshape the way Americans think about farms and farm work."