Kids’ Social Hardships on the Rise, Report Says

The well-being of the county’s children is in critical condition, with thousands of youngsters exposed to violence at home, poverty and inadequate health care, according to the second annual San Diego County Condition of Children report.

Although the report, released Wednesday, also shows encouraging recoveries in some areas, including education, the symptoms of social hardship prompted educators and health care workers alike to offer a gloomy prognosis.

“If children are our future, quite clearly their future and ours is at risk,” Blair Sadler, president of Children’s Hospital in San Diego, said at a news conference at Hoover High School.

Each day, 229 children in the city of San Diego are reported abused or neglected, Sadler said. If all of those reports proved true, it would translate into more than 80,000 such incidents a year.

The report, produced jointly by the county Office of Education, Children’s Hospital and the county of San Diego, provides other grim statistics reflecting the emotional and physical suffering amid the county’s under-18 population of about 610,000.

The number of children removed from their homes each year because of neglect and physical and sexual abuse has more than doubled in the past nine years, from 2,992 to 6,321 in fiscal 1992, the report says.

The number of children in families that receive Aid to Families With Dependent Children rose from 69,417 five years ago to 109,975 in 1991, according to the report.

Sadler said babies born in Spain, Singapore and 16 other countries have a better chance of reaching their first birthday than those born in San Diego. He also said that more than half of San Diego children lack adequate immunizations, inviting a return of deadly epidemics to the area.

The problems of society have spilled over into education, radically changing school conditions and populations, Joanne Brynjestad said at the news conference. Brynjestad chairs the San Diego School Board Assn., a 20-member group of school board members.

Just five years ago, making noise, chewing gum and running in the halls were common reasons schoolchildren got into trouble, she said. In the ‘90s, drugs, gang activity and racial prejudice have taken their place.

Despite these modern social hardships, the academic performance of local students has improved or stayed the same, she said, referring to reading, writing and math test scores and dropout rates.

The report shows the number of students dropping out of high school steadily declining over the past five years. For example, African-American students once had the highest dropout rate at 36.1%, but now rank with many of the other groups at 13.5%. Several years ago, a quarter of high school students dropped out; less than 12% do so today, the report says.

Students taking advanced-placement exams to qualify for college courses have steadily scored higher in the past five years, the report shows.

However, the number of college-bound students has slipped from 56.8% of graduates to 54.6%, the report says.

“Up to the present, we have been able to meet the challenge,” Brynjestad said. “But how long will we be expected to do more with less?”