Children in our midst

I recently acquired a copy of a report titled “Kids Count: The State of the Child”.  It is published by the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, is dated 2007, and includes 91 pages of facts and statistics that describe the status of Tennessee’s youngest citizens.  The report is published annually.

 

Much of the data provided is presented by county and I plan, during the next few weeks, to share some of it with readers of this web site.

 

The point of the exercise will be to emphasize the extent to which Unicoi County’s citizens rely on help form outside the county.  We like to think of ourselves as independent and self-sufficient people.  But the facts strongly suggest otherwise.  Our conservative neighbors persistently downplay the importance of social programs, insisting that all we need is to pull on our own bootstraps.  But our children don’t have bootstraps and all too often their parent, or parents, don’t either.  We’ll stroll through the numbers here.

You will learn, for instance, that over 45% of Unicoi’s children are enrolled in TennCare, a federal-state program that pays for medical services and covers Medicaid recipients and uninsured and uninsurable individuals under age 21. 

 

Should you be impatient to learn more, or desire to double-check my figures, you can go to <www.tennessee.gov/tccy>  or to a national site <www.aecf.org/cgi-bin/cliks.cgi>  wherein all the data I’ll be using can be found.

Alexander’s campaign

Senator Lamar Alexander is rarely heard from in Unicoi County.  But he’s now running for re-election, and he has a serious challenger this time.  Mike Padgett is running on the Democratic ticket, so Lamar needs to actually work at getting votes.  I was amused at his May 6 letter to the Editor of the Erwin Record.  In it he grumbles about Democrats’ stalling on appointments to the TVA board.  Good grief!  Ever since Dems took control of Congress in 2006 the Republicans’ sole governance strategy has been to block any initiative the majority party proposes.  But I guess when the other guys do it………….  In any event, Alexander got his few lines of free campaign advertising which no doubt is what he actually wanted.