New York City children may be, on balance, safer and healthier than a few years ago, but one particularly troubling trend is on the rise: Use of emergency food assistance. Since 2003, the number of children making use of food pantries and soup kitchens went from fewer than one in five to more than one in four. That sobering statistic is just one of hundreds listed in the latest installment of “Keeping Track of New York City’s Children,” a biannual data book and report issued by Citizen’s Committee for Children last week. Not all the news is so glum: The report also found that juvenile arrests are down and the percent of children covered by health insurance is up. As for any other questions about how New York City’s children are doing, concerned citizens and researchers can now forego requesting the hefty data tome. Instead, there’s a searchable database of stats available online. (T. McMillan)
[04/11/05]
