 Good morning, everyone. I hope you've all got coffee and breakfast tacos and are ready for an important conversation. Welcome to the 2016 State of San Antonio Children event. Thank you so much for being here so early on kind of a stormy morning. I'm Ann Beeson and I'm the Executive Director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities. At the Center, we believe in a Texas that gives everyone, all children, the chance to compete and succeed in life. And we believe that that means something pretty basic, that we should all be able to agree on, that every child has the right to be healthy, well-educated, and financially secure. And the role that we play among so many of you in the room who are committed to the same vision for Texas is we use data and analysis to advocate for policy solutions that give everyone, regardless of background, the chance to reach their full potential in our great state. We are so excited to be here in San Antonio. We are up in Austin for those of you who don't know us quite as well. And we're so delighted to be here and to have the support and partnership of the most amazing local organizations that you all are so lucky to have here in San Antonio. First of all, I want to recognize Methodist Healthcare Ministries, which has just been such an incredible partner for so many years on our work around child well-being in Texas. I also want to recognize our close partners and co-sponsors, The Voices for Children of San Antonio, the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and IDRA, if we could just all thank these wonderful organizations for their role here today. We are excited to have a number of our elected officials here today and many of their staff. I want to recognize just a few of them in apologies in advance. If someone snuck in and I missed you, we're very excited to have Representative Diego Bernal here and Representative Ina Minharas here. And we also have Judge Peter Sakai and Associate Judge Charles Motomeiro. And a little bit later in the morning, you're going to, in the day, you're going to get a chance to hear from County Judge Nelson Wolfe. Before we get started, I want to just recognize a few other people who are very near and dear to us at the center that are here today. First of all, many of you may not know that the Center for Public Policy Priorities has been around for 30 years and we were actually founded by the Benedictine sisters of Bernie Texas. And several of them are here today and we're so excited to have them here. These sisters had the great vision to understand that to change our state would require public policy solutions and that we needed an organization that could use data and analysis to sort of help move forward changes in our state. So we're so delighted to have them here. And we're also very delighted to have Mary Alice's Narrows here. Of course, you all know Mary Alice so well. We're delighted that among many other accolades she has received. We were very honored to honor her and her husband, Henry, as our Texas Legacy Honorees a few years back at CCCP. I'm going to say a few words about what we have in store for the morning for all of you. And I'm going to serve as your emcee for the morning and for the whole day, for those of you staying here for the whole day. But first of all, I am really excited to welcome up Kevin Moriarty, our longtime friend and ally and the CEO of Methodist Health Care Ministries, who's going to introduce the mayor. Thank you. Well, thank you. I'm always pleased to be here. And I'm always pleased to see such a wonderful group of advocates. Without your work, without your tireless efforts on behalf of our children, we would not be making the progress that we are making. And we would not be energized about the opportunities that are in front of us, which are always daunting, always difficult, and always requiring all of your energy, our energy collectively, the political leadership and the community leadership that's here. Thank you, Ann, for your leadership. Glad to have you there. And glad you're a partner with us in the public policy arena in Austin. And yes, I remember when St. Benedict's was sold, and we created the Benedictine Resource Center. And I was in Bernie with a lot of folk in the Ford Foundation as that was created. Thank you to all the elected officials and community leaders. Thank you, Dr. Devini and your staff. Thank you, Jennifer Lee, who will be presenting later on for pulling all this data together. We've been pleased to fund this research for nearly 10 years and to be a partner with these reports. And we've used these reports as guideposts for all that we do at Methodist Healthcare Ministries. And so as we've been ramping out services in the last 20 years, gosh, Marie Alice, I've been doing it for 20 years now, did the city for 20. We've taken care from 1,100 patient visits to 800,000 patient visits from one community nonprofit funded partner to several hundred in that period of time. And a delivery of care from $2 million to $100 million a year that we're putting into health and human services, into children's services, into the nonprofit world. And so Methodist Healthcare Ministries is blessed to have resources. I'm glad to be working for one funding source, not a city of San Antonio, where I had 50, and it was crazy trying to make this happen. We use all this data to guide our board, to guide the delivery of our care to the nonprofits we fund. We also use all this data. We are one half owner of the Methodist Healthcare System, the largest faith-based healthcare system. I feel like the other Berlin girl in the tutors, yes, Krista Staderosa, is the faith-based. I'm the other one, and we're the largest. We're also the largest children's hospital. We delivered 11,000 births last year at our children's hospital. And that, again, all this data guides us on the community, on what's happening in Barron and South Texas. We serve 74 counties, and those 74 counties are us and everything around us, and it's the Southwest Texas Conference, or the Rio Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. The data is the foundation for everything that we do. I love data, as many of you know. Data has a tendency to depoliticize the processes that we're in. The data should be true, and anytime it comes out of CPQ, it's true. And so true data is something we don't argue about. We frequently argue, though, about what to do with the result of the data, and that's our work today, tomorrow, and into the future. And I'm happy that we have a solid basis to make those decisions so that I don't get into arguments with people about the data, what is true, versus my opinion about what is true. It's been a lot of time arguing with people about my opinion and their opinion, and they happen to be wrong, and I happen to be right. And I'm gonna continue to argue and fight on these issues as well. Now it's my distinct honor. I'm sorry for my loss of voice. I don't know what's going on. Something must be in the air. It's my privilege and honor to introduce Mayor Ivy Taylor. Mayor Ivy Taylor was elected mayor of San Antonio on June 13th, 2015, and prior to that, she was appointed to the office of mayor in July of 2014. Mayor Taylor Held has served as the district two city council representative for a total of five years, beginning with her election in June of 2009. While serving as mayor, she's helped to achieve unanimous approval for the Vista Ridge Water Supply Project, balanced two budgets, and facilitated the creation of more than 1,000 new jobs and much, much, much, much more. She's a graduate of Yale University, had a professional career as an urban planner, and has accomplished so much in her service to the city, but I know she would say her most important achievement and job as being a mom. Mayor Taylor, thank you for all that you're doing. Thank you, Kevin, for that kind introduction. Good morning, everyone. Well, it is wonderful to be here with you. I'd like to thank the Center for Public Policy Priorities and all of your partners that have been noted Methodist Healthcare Ministries, Voices for Children, who I've enjoyed working closely with, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and IDRA. Thank you for all that you've done to create this forum today and the work that you do continuously in our community. And of course, thank you to everyone that's here in the room today. Your presence is proof that the health and wellbeing of our children in San Antonio is and will continue to be one of our community's top priorities. Unfortunately, we're here to share and discuss some of the disturbing facts and trends that we're experiencing in our community. According to the State of Texas, children, race, and equity in San Antonio Report, there are large disparities in child poverty across race and ethnicity lines. And a lot of it, of course, traces back to historical policies and practices which helped create and maintain unequal opportunities. But unfortunately, some of them still exist today. A few numbers for you. Almost 130,000 children in Bear County live in poverty and the majority of them are Latino. And poverty rates for Latino and black children are nearly three times higher than they are for white and Asian children in our community. And nearly one of every three Latino and black children in our area lives in poverty. Now, those statistics I say are unacceptable. We have to do better and be better for our children, for our communities, for our entire city. And my vision, my goal in this job as mayor is to work to connect every San Antonian, no matter their age, gender, or ethnicity, to opportunities for prosperity that abound right here in our city. One way we're hoping to fill the gaps is through the My Brother's Keeper initiative here locally. I'm sure you've heard of My Brother's Keeper, which is President Obama's initiative where he's challenged cities to come up with local programs that focus on improving life outcomes of our young men and boys of color, in part by graduating more of them from high school, by connecting them to job training and employment opportunities and connecting them to mentors. And the city of San Antonio is also fully investing in educating our smallest citizens through our Precaver Essay program that was approved by our voters a few years ago. And it's now servicing thousands of our littlest citizens throughout the four corners of our city. And we're already seeing educational gains they're making and are hopeful at the difference it will make in their lives in the future. From educating our youngest to providing extra training for adults, we must continue to work together to ensure that every citizen becomes a resource and not a responsibility. And as I look around the room this morning, I am confident that together we can and will break the chains of generational poverty. It starts with all of us here. Today's briefing is a key step. We'll be armed with the information that we need in order to get to work and take action. And as I've been quoted as saying here lately, I get to work hard and I am very much looking forward to working with all of you in this important work. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mayor Taylor, for being here and for your leadership and commitment to these important issues. In just a minute, we're gonna get started with our data presentation. And I just wanna, before we do that, just share a little bit about what we're hoping to get out of today and what we very much hope that you will take away from today. We feel that we are just servants at C-T-R-L-P here to support all of the great work that you all are doing. And so what we hope will happen is that this data will help support you in your work here in San Antonio and beyond. And we hope to compliment that work and help connect it to a statewide movement to improve child wellbeing on health, education, and opportunity. We have been producing a statewide kids count report for many years since 1993. And we use this data, of course, to track a number of indicators which you're about to hear about. This year we're very excited for the first time to have had the opportunity to research and publish data, not just at the statewide level and not just in one or two communities, but in multiple communities around Texas. We released a Dallas report earlier this spring and we're gonna be going to Fort Worth after we're here in San Antonio. And we really do believe that together we can change the equation and help all of our kids in every city, in every town in Texas, succeed. One of the things you'll see when you look through our statewide report is you'll see how Texas compares to other states in terms of child wellbeing. And I'm sorry, but just as Mayor Taylor said, the numbers for San Antonio are unacceptable. The numbers for the state of Texas are unacceptable. We are 41st in the nation in child wellbeing in Texas. And I happen to be a native Texan and a very proud one and that is just not okay. We all have got to work together to change that and make Texas the number one state for kids and families, not 41st. We are very eager at the center to hear your ideas throughout the day and to learn how we can better support you. We were very grateful and I did want to just recognize that we had a statewide advisory committee that helped us through the entire evolution of this report and we had a number of partners here in San Antonio. David Ina Hosa and Lori Posner from IDRA and Kathy Fletcher from Voices for Children War gave us great feedback on earlier drafts of the report and we really couldn't have produced a great quality report without the help from partners around the state. We hope that what you'll take away is a renewed sense of just how much a part of wellbeing for children, race and ethnicity is unfortunately. We want to change that so that it doesn't matter regardless of your background. Every one of the state has the chance to reach their full potential. That is not where we are today and we hope that the data that we're providing will help you understand why and what we can do to fix that. Our day does have two parts. We know that several of you are here for the whole day and we're so excited that you're here. After our morning data briefing we are going to be holding a full day workshop. We have wonderful partners who I'll introduce later who are here to help all of us together learn how we can use this data even better in our work and how to develop a policy agenda and as I said, a movement to help all kids succeed. One thing you'll notice and I hope you have enjoyed them is that we have a kind of a theme for this year's report that's kind of about reaching for the stars and you see rockets and you see our cute kids and spacesuits on your tables here and I think that that's a great metaphor for what we're trying to do which is to make sure every single kid in Texas can reach for the stars. I wanna use a different metaphor for a minute and leave you with a story before I introduce our great research associate to give you the data presentation and that's actually a story about my own child. This is a picture you see up here and last summer my son who's now 16 had an incredible opportunity which was to hike over 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail up in Maine and he did this with a group of kids who come from an incredibly diverse set of backgrounds. We had poor kids from the Bronx and LA. We had very wealthy kids from Boston and Chicago and we had middle-class kids like my kid in Austin and some of these kids had hiked before. Some of them had climbed mountains. Many of them had never done anything like that but because they all got the support that they needed they all reached the summit and that's what we need to do for our kids here in Texas. I now wanna introduce Jennifer Lee who is our absolutely fantastic research associate at the Center for Public Policy Priorities. Jennifer is the one that crunched all the data that gives you this beautiful report in your packets today and she's been with us for three years and you're gonna just see what a fantastic presenter and researcher she is and with that I'm gonna welcome up Jennifer. Thank you. Thanks, Ann. And thank you all for being here today. I have to admit I was a little worried because of the storm yesterday and also the basketball game that all of you would be too depressed to come here for a data presentation this morning but I see a full room, I'm really excited. I hope you all get a chance after the presentation to talk and connect with each other. I'm sure you see other friends in the room and I just wanna recognize that this is a really powerful group of people that we have here in this room today. So thank you so much for being here. As Ann said, my name is Jennifer Lee. I'm a research associate with the Center for Public Policy Priorities and our state of Texas children report is actually part of a larger project that we have at the center called the Texas Kids Count Projects and the goal of the Texas Kids Count Project is really to improve child wellbeing through the use of data. So for any of you who use Twitter or social media will be using the hashtag Kids Count during this presentation. And yeah, so as a reminder also on your tables you'll have the Twitter handles of both the center and all of our partners here in San Antonio to stay engaged with us through social media. So I wanted to start by inviting you this morning to really just take a journey with me and introduce this metaphor of the journey that I found very helpful in working on this report and going through the data. And I've been thinking about the idea of a journey a lot lately. Few weeks ago we were really lucky to all together as a staff take a trip to Bernie and not too far from here to visit with our founders, the Benedictine sisters. And they shared with us their journey as a community which spans over a hundred years and share with them how they've grown as a community. The Benedictine sisters journey started actually in Cuba, then to Las Gallinas, Texas, to San Antonio and out of Bernie along the way. They did some incredible things, ran St. Benedict's Hospital and Nursing Home in San Antonio, ran St. Albert's school, where actually Mary Alice Sissneras went to high school. And it was so incredible to just think about how the work that we do at the Center for Public Policy Priorities every day is really part of this larger story of the Benedictine sisters and their 100 year journey to serve their community as best they can. So it was just, I never really connected those dots before and it was really incredible to think about that journey. It also made me reflect a little bit on my own journey and my family's journey. My family, my parents immigrated to the US when they were in their 20s, like many people's families do have immigration in their family journey and family story. And as a, growing up, my family moved around quite a bit. So by the time that I graduated from high school, my brother and I had lived in three different states and we had gone to six or seven different schools in many different states and contexts throughout the US. And so part of our experience as a family was, and my brother and I's experience was being the new kid, new kid in school, new kid in class, new kid on the block and often in communities where we were sort of the only families and kids who looked like we did. In that experience, I think growing up, that feeling of exclusion sometimes from the communities that we were living in of wanting to be included really sort of shaped, I think, inclusion being a core value of mine and also planted the seed for my desire to do work on equity and racial and ethnic equity with children. So I just wanted to share a little bit of that with you and hope that you'll reflect a little bit on your own personal journey, on your family journey, on your organizational journey towards understanding racial equity, figuring out the place that it has in your life and your work and how it can impact your community. So at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, our vision for kids is for Texas to be a state where every child is healthy, well-educated and financially secure. Now, what adding a racial and ethnic equity lens to this vision is being very serious about this part, every child, oops. Are we as a state willing to commit the resources to create the policy support to adapt the practices that we have to make sure that every child has the opportunity to be healthy, well-educated and financially secure? So that's how I'm gonna structure my presentation today. We're gonna talk about health, education and financial security, sort of those core components of child wellbeing. And I'm gonna start with financial security. Now, when you start talking about race and ethnicity and financial security in particular, a lot of times the conversation starts with statements like this. It's not race, it's poverty. Now, what I hear, I hear a few things when I hear statements like this in conversations that we've had in staff and with other community groups. The first is that, and I wanna recognize, is that it's very uncomfortable for most people to talk about the role of race or ethnicity in their lives. For some people, it's painful to talk about the experiences that they've had, and it's just not a pleasant topic. So often we'd rather avoid it and focus on poverty instead. And poverty is extremely important to child wellbeing. It's one of the key indicators that we look at at the center. We know from research that poverty during childhood affects children's health outcomes, it affects their educational opportunities and their educational outcomes. It affects their likelihood of living in poverty as adults and the financial security they may experience as adults. So an extremely important thing to look at. The other thing that I hear from advocates from a data perspective, since a lot of the work that we do at the Texas Kids Count Project is around data, is that they're afraid that if we break down data and indicators by race and ethnicity, and there are differences in some of those outcomes, that what people will automatically jump to and what they will hear is that there is something wrong with certain groups of children, that there is something broken about certain groups of children. Instead of the reality, which is that there is something broken about the structures and the systems that we have in place to support children that are shaping those different outcomes. But I wanna recognize that that is also a fear that I have heard from any different advocates around the state. But I would argue that without breaking down data by race and ethnicity, and by many other different factors, we're really missing a big part of the picture in understanding what's going on with kids, understanding what's going on with families, and that understanding is really the basis of what the foundation of figuring out how we can help improve well-being for kids. So let's just look at some data. About 27% of kids in Bear County live in poverty. It's about $24,000 for a family of four. It's the poverty line. But when we break down the data by race and ethnicity, we see that there are large differences in who poverty is the most likely to affect in our communities. Nearly one in three black and Latino children in Bear County are affected by poverty and the rates are much lower for other groups of children. We also know, though, that financial security is not just about poverty. There are many, many families in our communities working families who live above the poverty line that are still struggling. When we look at the median household income, it's another common statistic that you see of families with children in Bear County. It's about $51,000. But when you break that down by race and ethnicity, you again see that there are large differences in the amount of financial resources that families throughout Bear County have in being able to sustain and support their families. So instead of saying it's not race, it's poverty, it's helpful, I think, to say it's both race and poverty. These are two important factors that we need to look at when we're looking at the data, when we're looking at the opportunities that we're providing for our children. And there are other factors that are important as well. We know that race and gender matter. The experience of black males growing up in our communities is very different from that of black females, for example. We know that place or where you grow up matters. A kid growing up, a Latino kid growing up on the west side of San Antonio and the north side of San Antonio is gonna have a different set of experiences. And for your program or for your context, there might be other factors that matter. It might be immigration status, it might be education level. There are all these factors that are important to look at to be able to understand what's going on with kids and families so that we can just get a clear picture of what's going on in our communities. There are just two examples of sort of these interactions that we think are important to lift up that I'd like to share with you today. The first is around race, gender, and family structure. When we look at poverty rates for our single mother families, we see that nearly 40% of our single mother families in Bear County live in poverty. When we break that down by race and ethnicity, again, there are racial and ethnic differences in which single mother families are more likely to be affected by poverty. We also see in the data that single father families are also affected by poverty but are less likely to live in poverty. And that when we break that down by race and ethnicity, there are actually different patterns that emerge around who is most affected, likely to be affected by poverty. And we know that this matters because families are different than they used to be 50, 60 years ago. More than one in three kids in Bear County lives with a single parent. So when we're talking about what are the structures and supports that we have for single parent families, we're talking about a significant number of children in our community. The problem is that a lot of the policies are sometimes lack of policies that we have around childcare, around workplace flexibility, even around whether or not you can take a day off if your kid is sick and you need to take care of your child are kind of stuck in this situation that assumes a family structure that is not a reality for many of our families today and that our policies have really not adapted to caught up with the modern families of today. So that's one sort of interaction between looking at the way that race interacts with both family structure and gender that I wanted to lift up. A second interaction that's extremely important in the data is that between race, place and poverty, I wanted to share a couple of maps with you. So this first map is just a child population map of Bear County. So the blue represents Hispanic or Latino children and you'll see that they live all throughout Bear County and are the most populous group of children living in Bear County. See that sort of orangeish-brown color represents wider Anglo children and they're more likely to live sort of in the outer northern areas of the county. The yellow represents black children in Bear County and the largest numbers of black children sort of live in the eastern part of San Antonio. Now the next map that I'm going to show you is a poverty map. So the blue here represents areas of high poverty in Bear County. The yellow is moderate and mixed income poverty levels and then the orangeish-brown are areas of very low poverty. And you'll see when you start comparing these maps that there are some patterns on who is most and least likely to be affected by poverty in the community. One of the things, there are many different conclusions sort of in observations that you can make about these maps. One of the things that I find sort of most interesting about these maps is that Latino children really live kind of everywhere in both low, middle and high poverty areas throughout Bear County but that white and Anglo children are much more likely to live in those low poverty areas that we have in Bear County. And it's important to recognize I think we've done these maps for Dallas County and other areas in the state that none of these divisions are natural in any way, that they've really been constructed through decisions and policy choices and practices that have been made in the past that often determine sort of the geographies of what our counties look like today. I know that Dr. Christine Jenin, I think is here today from Trinity University who has actually done a lot of research specifically on the San Antonio community about this, about how some of the historical choices that were made around housing developments, who was allowed to live in the new housing that was being constructed in San Antonio, who was allowed to attend certain schools in San Antonio has affected even the divisions in where children live, where they learn and where they played a day. So it's important to remember again that sort of that history matters on both the positive aspects and the negative aspects of our history matters and influencing what we see today and what's happening with kids. The second thing to note is that place really does matter. We know in the research that neighborhoods are the primary access point for kids and families for all of the opportunities that they have. It affects what schools that they have access to and the resources that are in those schools, the educational opportunities they have, whether or not their parents have access to jobs, whether there's how safe their streets are, whether or not parents have easy access to even simple things like banks and grocery stores, sort of all the things that families need to be able to live and to thrive. And that when we look at sort of the resources that are available in low and high poverty areas, we know that the opportunities and experiences of children are often very different in different parts of cities. Health, place is a huge piece of the next topic that we're going to talk about, which is health. We believe that every kid in Texas should be healthy, well-educated and financially secure. And I'm gonna talk about three different aspects of children's health today. I'm gonna talk about healthcare access through health insurance. I wanna spend a little bit of time also to talk about maternal health and the importance of maternal health on infant health. And then also access to healthy foods, which we believe is a core part of supporting children's health and wellness. When we look at child uninsured rates in Bear County, Bear County actually has one of the lowest child uninsured rates in Texas, which is fantastic. And we've seen improvements over the last five years for children of all races and ethnicities. Another one interesting thing though to look at the improvements that have been made, I think are to see that certain groups of children have made improvements faster than others and to see where some of the barriers still remain. So we see that Hispanic children in Bear County are still the most likely to be uninsured. Research has shown so that there are a number of different barriers that are more likely to affect Latino families that involve things like parents' access to insurance for their children through their employers. Also, when immigration is part of a family experience, just the complexity of navigating a new system, the language barriers that come into play, those same barriers are actually evident in different communities in Texas we've seen among certain Asian immigrant communities as well. That affects the likelihood of being uninsured. So we've made a lot of improvement in this arena through community outreach, through the policy choices that we've made. But again, of course, we're always trying to improve and there are improvements that we can make in getting children access to the healthcare that they need. One of the things that we know that can improve this even more is closing the coverage gap. Now the coverage gap is when people earn too much to be eligible for Medicaid in the state of Texas, but they earn too little to be eligible for financial assistance that can help them pay for health insurance in the marketplace. About 75,000 adults in Bear County, it's estimated fall into that coverage gap. And although the coverage gap only technically affects adults, we know that in reality affects children in multiple ways. First is that children who are much more likely to be insured if their parents are insured, a lot of the uninsured children that we see are in families that are just disconnected from healthcare. And we also know that parents' healthcare access in particular just affects the safety and the health and well-being of children. When parents have the physical healthcare that they need, the mental healthcare access that they need, we've seen in particular effects around families' financial security that helps support families when parents are connected to health insurance and to healthcare access. I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about mothers in particular and the importance of mothers and women's healthcare access to their children's health. When we look at women between the ages of 15 and 44, whereas the age group that are most likely to be caring for children, we see that nearly one in four women in that age group in Bear County lack health insurance. It's actually the age group that's least likely to have health insurance of women and that there are differences by race and ethnicity. Now many women actually can gain health insurance coverage if they become pregnant and soon after giving birth will fall into the coverage gap because they don't have any health insurance options after giving birth the way that our eligibility rules work. We know that women's health before, during and after pregnancy are so important to supporting infant health in a couple of different ways. Health insurance access is one of the key factors that we see for example in whether or not women get access to on time prenatal care. And when we look at who is most and least likely to have on time prenatal care in Bear County, we see that there are differences by race and ethnicity. And we also see differences in some important infant health indicators such as the likelihood of being born premature at low birth weight and also even dying before reaching your first birthday. And there's, you'll notice that black mothers are actually the most likely to have experienced premature birth and low birth weight. And there's been a lot of research sort of done on this to show that it's nothing, that there's no genetic basis to sort of the likelihood of women of different races and ethnicities to be more likely to have things like low birth weight babies or premature birth. But that stress actually isn't a key factor in outcomes like premature birth and low birth weight. And that black women in our community are much more likely to experience multiple stressors involving financial stress, different social stresses of family and personal stress that there's actually a lot of scientific research sort of around the different hormones that our bodies sort of release when we experience severe stress and how that can affect infant's health even during pregnancy. And the last topic that I just wanna touch on briefly is food insecurity. We at the Center consider hunger and food insecurity as a key piece of our work in health and wellness and because it's sort of the foundation of children's health. And these are statewide numbers and we see that statewide that there are differences in the likelihood of who is most and least likely to live in food insecure households. Food insecurity is a symptom of financial insecurity. It's not the parents don't wanna feed their kids, it's just that oftentimes they can't make the dollars stretch through the month to have consistent access to food every day for their kids. Now one of the amazing partners that we have worked with in the past and that I'm sure many of y'all have worked with in all of your partners is schools. Schools have been a tremendous partner in fighting food insecurity for children. We know that kids spend much of their days at school. So providing access to meals, lunch, breakfast if they're running after school programs, meals or snacks during after school programs is an area where we're hoping to see some more growth have been a tremendous partner. And for those of you who are staying for the workshop in the afternoon, we're actually gonna talk a little bit more about and consider the role that after school meals in particular have in our community in effecting the food insecurity for kids. And I think also it's important to know that schools don't just do this because out of the goodness of their hearts because they're good people because they think that it would be nice to provide meals for kids. They know that it helps them learn. They know that it helps them to pay kids to pay attention to focus. There's a reason we serve y'all breakfast tacos before making you listen to me talk about data. We know that you can't really focus in school unless if you're hungry. So which brings me to sort of our last topic here which is education. We believe at the center that every child in Texas should be healthy, well-educated and financially secure. And when you start talking about education and racial equity in particular, a lot of times the conversation will start gravitating towards the achievement gap. So achievement gap is often looking at differences in some sort of outcome measure, high school graduation rates, star testing and looking at differences like that. So this is one example. This is four year high school graduation rates. We've seen great improvements among children of all races and ethnicities within Bear County and still some barriers to address for black and Latino children. I know our partners at IDRA have done a tremendous amount of work and research for many years over attrition rates in their attrition studies and looking at the holding power of high schools, both within Bear County but statewide and the work that they do. What's a little more difficult for people sometimes to start measuring and understanding is the opportunity gap. These are those six, seven, eight different things that have happened before we get to high school graduation before we get to the day of the test. That can include things like whether or not kids are hungry, whether or not they're moving a lot because their families are experiencing financial instability. That's why we want to look at all of those things, health and wellness, health is a key factor in children's education that we know, health, family financial security and see how it all ties together. Now I have to admit that coming into San Antonio, I think you actually all get this pretty well. The history that San Antonio has had from families and schools and communities sort of raising their voices about school funding and the resources that are available for our schools, the work that you all have done around early education and the knowing the importance that our early learning opportunities have for our kids, sort of demonstrate and understanding around the importance of not just looking at the achievement gap measures which are important to tracking, to setting goals, sort of tracking progress towards goals, figuring out what we can do to help improve those measures but also to really take a look at what are the things, again that are happening before that that are feeding into our educational system. And so all of us have sort of been in a strange holding pattern at the Center for Public Policy Priorities and I'm sure our partners at Maldiff have also been where we've been kind of just waiting to see when the Texas Supreme Court is gonna say something. We've been saying, oh, it's gonna happen any day now for like months now I think. So we're all sort of waiting to see what's gonna happen. But regardless of what the court says, I think it's very clear from, again, from schools, districts, communities, families all across the state that our families want the legislature to be serious about investing resources in our schools. And it's important to recognize the key role that the state actually plays in that and why that's important. We have huge disparities in wealth within our communities that necessitates a strong state role in providing more equitable school funding. When we look at the poorest ISD in Bear County, we see that the district has about $84,000 of property value per student that's available to be taxed to provide revenue for the schools in that district. When you compare it to the wealthiest ISD in Bear County, there's over a million dollars of property value within the district per student that can be taxed to provide revenue for the schools. This is why it's so important that the state continue to have and build upon their strong role in our school finance system because our state funding, our funding for schools is still largely based on local revenues and local property taxes that are raised. Now my, oh and this really is a racial equity issue. Our partners here I think at MALDEF have been working on this for many years, understand that. When you look at the demographics of who attends sort of the poorest and the wealthiest ISDs in Bear County, we know that the poorest ISD in Bear County is predominantly Latino and that the wealthiest ISD in Bear County is majority white. And you know, we know that resources matter. Lots of people will try to tell you that resources don't matter, but I think if you then ask them if it would be okay, if their school had less resources to do what they needed to do, they would maybe say, maybe resources do matter in the schools. I know my husband is actually a public school teacher in Austin ISD. He's been a teacher for about 10 years now and we moved here to Texas. He moved here to Texas from Chicago where he also taught in public schools in Chicago. And he knows that resources matter. I know that resources matter. When we first moved to Texas, the first thing that we did after he got his first position at the middle school where he still teaches that was jump onto Craig's list and find any books that he could find. And we drove all around central Texas, picking up books from many former teachers actually so that he could have books in his classroom. If I'm looking for anything at home and I can't find it, if any of you all know teachers or are married to teachers, you know, it's probably at school. You know, I think probably half of our stuff has somehow over the years like migrated to the classroom. I don't, but it's because, you know, not only the resource he knows as a teacher that the resources that he has for his kids in his classroom matters, we know, you know, on a wider level at schools and districts, the resources that we have in our school matters and the opportunities that we're able to provide for our children. So we know that school finance is a racial equity issue in Texas. And when we looked at the data and other sort of experiences that kids have in our schools, we see other differences by race and ethnicity. We wanted to see, look at teacher turnover and school instability and which students were most likely to be affected by that within Bear County. We see that black students in Bear County are much more likely to attend schools with high teacher turnover, with instability that we know is bad for educational performance. It's expensive for schools and often has to do with sort of the resources and supports that are available in our schools for our teachers. Another thing that we looked at was access to courses. So this is the racial and ethnic makeup of public school students in Bear County, just in general. And we looked at AP computer science. We know that, you know, computer science is a course that's gonna be very important sort of in the critical thinking and skills of our students in the future and who has access to those courses. And we see that Latino students are significantly underrepresented in having access to some of those AP computer science courses which require computers. They require computer labs. They require teachers and professional development for teachers who are able to provide instruction on that course. So I wanna return to just our vision statement for Texas kids that we believe that every child in Texas should be healthy, well-educated and financially secure. And we know that the likelihood that kids have of achieving sort of this vision that we have for Texas as we've seen in the data as we've seen in our history is often affected by our policy choices. Choosing to create the children's health insurance program for example, helped a lot of kids get connected to health insurance. Not choosing to close the coverage gap has left many families out. When we look at our school funding, improvements that we've made to our school funding formulas in the past have really helped equalize the resources and the opportunities in our schools. But when we under-fund our schools and sort of continue to raise the standards that we set for kids without providing those additional resources, we see the impact of that on our students. And we also see the impacts again, it's important to recognize the impact of history and have historical policy choices on the financial security of our kids and families today. So what can we do about this? There are a lot of different recommendations in the report. We hope that you're able to spend some time after the presentation and during the workshop talking more about what you can do both at the local level and support at the state level to improve things for kids in Texas. But I'm gonna offer up just a few of our high level of state policy priorities here today. The first thing is really simple actually. It's just to collect the data. Collect it, analyze it, use it, love it, love the data. I know that when in researching this report sometimes it's really hard to find data by race and ethnicity. Oftentimes it's not there, it's not collected or it's just not reliable. A lot of times when people run programs and I run into this myself, it's people don't are told to skip the question or not ask the question because it's uncomfortable and because they think people will be confused. But if you do have it within your power I think to advocate for that data collection I mean it's really important again not just to just have it for data sake but to really use it as a starting point if we see differences to think about why is it that we are seeing those differences? Can we break that down? Can we understand further what's going on with our kids and then break those barriers down? The second recommendation I have is around supporting working families. Again, more than one in three of every kid in Bear County lives with a single parent. And for kids who work with, who live with two parents you know the reality is that most of our families today, both parents are working. It's not a reality that our policies still seem to assume that there's a full-time breadwinner and that a family can make it on one income and that there's a full-time parent who's care-taking. So that might look different in different communities. It might mean something as simple as policies around paid sick days. We know that childcare is a huge issue for families, for child safety, for children's well-being throughout Texas. Looking organizationally at your policies around leave for parents or for your employees who might need to take care of elderly family members. You know that our families are multi-generational and that care often goes both ways, both to younger generations and older generations. But that our policies, both state-level policies, local and workplace policies haven't really caught up to the realities of families today. The third policy recommendation is to close the coverage gap. Again, we know that when parents are more connected to health insurance that children are more connected. We know that parents' health impacts children's health. And although Bear County does have one of the lowest child uninsured rates in Texas, we as a state are tied for last, actually for having the worst child uninsured rates as a state. Texas has the highest uninsured rates for adults. And we've seen in experiences with other states that closing the coverage gap is a key piece of improving that picture for our families. And the last recommendation that I would lift up to you again is about making school funding more adequate and equitable. Again, we're all sort of awaiting the school finance decision. But either way that comes out, I think again our communities have sent a strong message and should continue to advocate for that for legislators. The principle of equity too, it's important to note, is something that can occur at all different levels of the educational system. It happens between funding within districts, but within a district, equity might mean making different choices about how resources are allocated within schools. Within a school, equity might look like thinking about the opportunities and the supports that are offered different children, different classrooms within a school. So equity is a principle that can be carried throughout all levels of the education system, although we tend to focus between districts when we're looking at the state level. And in addition to these policy recommendations, there are a few things that you can do right now to think about how to incorporate racial equity into your child wellbeing work. The first is to just continue learning. Something that we have started at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which I just offer as a suggestion, it's worked well for us, is sort of a, it's the busy person's version of a book club, which is that it's an article club. It's an all staff article club where our staff will get together to read and discuss an article that is relevant to a racial equity topic that is currently today. So that's something that you could do if it works for your organization. The second is to connect. That's really an extension of learning. I know y'all in San Antonio are really good at this. Last time we were visiting, we went out to lunch with our partners and our partners saw other people that they knew at lunch and they knew other people that we knew and pretty much it just felt like it was a family reunion because everyone at the restaurant actually knew each other. So I know that in San Antonio you're very good at doing this, but maybe you are more used to working around certain issues but haven't yet introduced the topic of racial equity or whether or not there's a common understanding of racial equity across organizations. So we have a racial equity working group actually within the organization that kind of tries to get everyone sort of on the same page about that. But for that is sort of a suggestion as well that might work for you. And then the last thing is to support each other. I know that you do this really well again within San Antonio that you kind of all pitch in. But I encourage you to really think broadly. Think outside of San Antonio. What can San Antonio offer to kids in Dallas, to kids in Houston? Because everyone needs support throughout the state if that's anything, there's anything that we've learned sort of in our work throughout the state is that there are many common needs, there's many supports that people throughout the state need. It might be sharing some best practices that you've learned in your work to organizations not only in San Antonio but outside of San Antonio that are similar child-serving organizations. It might be getting connected at what's going on with state politics if you're involved mostly with local politics. So thinking broadly about the support that you can give and that can really come out of San Antonio I think is critically important at the state level and in other cities, we need you. So an easy way that you can sort of start doing all of these things too is outside when you're coming and you might have noticed there's a bulletin board with sort of our four policy priorities that I've highlighted here. If on your way out or during the break if you're staying for the workshop, if you can pin your business card or just write your name or contact information on a post it's sort of around the area that you're most interested in connecting with other folks and with the center on. We'll get back in touch with you and try to sort of help facilitate any connections that we can because again, we really need everyone's support in trying to make Texas the best state for kids. So I just want to close by thanking you for taking this journey with me. I want to recognize again that we're all in different places in this journey towards racial equity, towards understanding racial equity, figuring out how it applies to our work, figuring out how it's played out in our lives and that's at an individual level on a very, it could be on a very personal level, it could be on an organizational level and just at a community level with the community of San Antonio, the progress that's made reflecting on it, thinking about where the city wants to go. So thank you very much for spending your morning with me and I just thank you all for being here. So thank you. We have a, until we have a few minutes for questions before we go into our one of our activities and discussions, if anyone had any clarifying questions. Sorry, you're gonna have to, the light's a little blinding so if anyone had any questions, I see Francis has one out there. Jennifer, you are that good. There are no questions. Well, I think people are wanting to talk with each other. That's what I'm seeing out here. So we can just move on to the discussion part if, oh, we see one question. Oh, the slides will be available. Yes, thank you for asking. Wonderful, so wanna just thank Jennifer for all of her amazing work on this report and for her great presentation. So we wanna actually get you guys talking at the tables because we know you probably have a million ideas and questions and concerns as I certainly did reading over this report. And so we actually want you to do a little table discussion and here's the question that I'm gonna throw out for you guys to talk about for about 10 minutes. And I'm gonna give you a warning when we, when we get close to the 10 minute mark. Here's the question. What is already happening here in San Antonio in your organization, in your life, what do you know about that's already happening to reduce disparities in child wellbeing? And how could this information that you just heard from Jennifer help close those gaps? So if you could just share, and you may wanna do very brief introductions if you're at a table with people you don't know yet. So just introduce yourselves briefly and dive right in and we are gonna ask one person from some of the tables to share in one sentence what a big new idea, a big takeaway from your conversation of the tables it is. So again, what is already happening here in San Antonio that's working to reduce disparities and that you can share with the other people at your table and how could this information help close the remaining gaps? Thank you. Just as a follow-up note, we will have a discussion in panel after the table talk. So please stay with us. Okay, you guys have about two more minutes to finish your conversations at the table. Thank you. Numbers do tell you. You got it. You got it? Yeah. Great story you shared, right? I appreciate it. That was something that's great. Great job, I'm gonna go be a lawyer. So I just... Yeah, this was a, I think it's like an Eastern time in the deal because I'm gonna check on my lady. That's not an Eastern time. All right. Okay, everybody, if you could just wrap up your conversations. We are going to make this a whole room conversation. We're going to bring some of you all into the conversation in just a second. But first, I want to welcome up here to the stage to be part of our conversation and to give some of their reflections. Victor Landa. Victor is a longtime journalist and community leader here in San Antonio who has been committed to lifting up equity and community voices throughout his career. And I'm also very excited to welcome up Dr. George Williams, who has a great title, I love your title, George, Dean of Student Success at Our Lady of the Lake. He's also, of course, an education expert himself and a data geek like a lot of us at the center and works closely with my brother's keeper here in San Antonio, a really wonderful, great effort to help kids here in San Antonio. So before we kind of have a conversation here, we did want to hear just a few ideas that came up from your table. So again, we have roaming mics and I really hope that somebody will be brave enough to share a few words, just a sentence or two about what you all talked about at your table. And we're going to voluntel somebody if we, here we go, here we go. And if you could say who you are first and then share your feedback. Well, good morning. My name is Ortencia Carmona. I'm the regional evaluator for the Prevention Resource Center. One of the keys that we found that help in our communities, what's already happening in San Antonio to reduce the child disparities is child care and education at a very young age. And when the state is not able to provide that, the local communities and agencies come together to try to provide those services for parents. That's great. Really, really important conversation about the need for more child care to help both the kids be ready for success and to help the parents as a work support. What else came up at your tables? A few other. Here we go. We have one over here. Good morning. My name is Melissa Williamson with Family Service Association. What are the things that we spoke about at our table as being able to move the needle on uninsured families and also workforce development? Wonderful. Uninsured and workforce, both equally important issues. Yeah. People are concerned about early exposure and continuous and good access to digital media and digital learning resources. Digital learning resources, great. Even at the pre-K level. Yeah, absolutely. We have one right here. Thank you very much. I'm Christine Norton. I'm an associate professor at Texas State University. And I would just like to also mention the foster care system in our state as being an incredibly important aspect of this conversation that I think often gets left out with the recent court case declaring our foster care system unconstitutional. I think that it's something that we need to begin to connect the dots with this data and that data and do something to help those children that often get really lost in that system. Wonderful. Let's have one more. We have one up here. And I'm hoping that everybody else out there. I know many, many of you are staying for our full day workshop. And that whole workshop is going to be incredibly interactive. So it'll give us a lot more time to spend together. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Two more. We'll do two more. Let's do two more quickly. David Enoa is a national director of policy with IDRA. We talked about issues involving immigrant children and the work that the Benedictine nuns are doing in support of those children that are being detained in Carnes and Dilly. We also talked about the work of the Texas Latino Education Coalition that really pushes for fair and equitable school policies, including fair funding, and how we can connect and use some of the data that you've shared here collectively among our large coalition that is primarily based out of San Antonio in pushing for more fair policies statewide. Wonderful. Thank you, David. And then let's just have one last comment here. OK. My name is Delia Martinez, and I'm with the grandparents racing grandkids. And one thing that I have to say is that we also work kind of like foster parents, because we're the ones that step up to take care of these children. And when you say there's two parents working, when you think about grandparents, there's no parents working. And it might be social security. That's all they have. Others are lucky, then they can have more. But this is something that was not brought up, and I think we need to start a conversation on this, because they're the ones that are stepping up to do the same thing, to take care of these children. That's absolutely true. I'm so glad that you brought that up. And in fact, we did a report at the center a little over a year ago just on kinship care and how important it is to provide support to relatives who are taking care of children. So thank you so much for bringing that into the conversation. And then yes, one more. Yes, absolutely. Let's do this. Yeah. Did we lose the mics? Uh-oh. Mandy, somebody? Frances. Here she is. She's coming back in from behind the curtain. Hi. I work for Texas Health and Human Services. And I actually work for Center for Elimination of Disproportionality and Disparities. And so what we talked about at our table is the fact that we have Stephanie Ramos, who also works for Child Protective Service. We have been addressing disproportionality and disparities, disproportionality within child welfare since 2007. We address disparities within health care, education, juvenile justice, criminal justice, mental health, and as I said, child welfare. We would love to partner with anyone. We deliver trainings where we do racial inequity trainings, talking about looking at our systems and what policies and procedures have been on the books for years that have bad outcomes for some of the people that we serve. We look at how us as systems may be well-meaning people, but sometimes we have unintended consequences by the policies and procedures that have existed for years. Thank you so much for bringing that in. It's such great work that you're doing. And for those of you who don't know, absolutely find out more about it. Great state-level work around racial disparities. So thank you. So I want to just bring our guests here into the conversation. And George, just ask you as an educator to reflect a little bit on what you've heard out here, what you've seen in the report and the data, and where you think we should be going from here in terms of changing outcomes for San Antonio kids. I'm on now. Can I just first of all say I love San Antonio. I love San Antonio. It's an awesome place growing up in Miami, Florida. It was a little overwhelming for me. And so coming here to San Antonio has been absolutely amazing. One of the things I like to mention is that a child that is only educated at school is an uneducated child. Can I just say that? Being a foster parent and also being a parent that recently adopted a kid, two years old, y'all prayed for me. In August, I certainly resonate with the comments being made regarding our foster care system and the fact that there is a strong need to make sure that recapturing our children that are in the CPS area. So I appreciated those comments. So what I've resonated with the most here, and given the data that's been presented, is something that really has not been touched on. And that is still the disproportionate number of African-American as well as Latino males in our special education settings. We still need to focus on the disproportionate numbers of those students that are still in our special ed setting in terms of having a well-educated type of system. And so we also need to address that. We also need to talk about the cultural responsiveness that we need to have throughout our college and university settings, the fact that in how we are preparing future educators to work with a diverse student population, we need to continue to infuse cultural responsiveness, being able to understand that we need to teach students as individuals and being able to continue to understand who we are and resonate with our own culture in order for us to teach our students that are diverse. So disproportionate numbers of special ed is very much important for me. I like to see more of that data being presented in terms of how we are using that data to address that issue, but more importantly, addressing the issue of cultural responsiveness, being able to understand that race disparity is important as it relates to that responsiveness. That's great. Thank you so much, George. And Victor, if you could just share a little bit from your perspective as a journalist on what you sort of saw, what was interesting to you about the data and how we could use it as a community to change those numbers. Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned to both of you when I sat here that I'm a data geek, and it doesn't seem like I would be, but there's something about numbers that speak to me. Numbers tell stories, and I'm a storyteller. And there are so many stories, and it can become overwhelming, I think, when I look at the expanse of this room, so many people that are representing so many different places. How do you get all of the stories in a cohesive way so that they can turn into action? And what I see as a good point, a good rallying point, is to change the general narrative of our city so that the welfare of our children is placed front and center. Because we talk a good game. We say it is, but it really isn't. We talk about industry, and we talk about tourism. We talk about a whole bunch of things in this city. And children seem to be an afterthought. But if we could put children front and center. And I'll give you an example. I sit on the board of Port San Antonio here in the city. And there is so much that's happening right now. There's so much momentum behind turning this city into a leader of cybersecurity. And it makes perfect sense. The only city in the country that has more cybersecurity experts that has more than San Antonio's Washington, DC. Very few people know that about this city. There's a lot of cybersecurity experts. So it makes sense to foster that industry. In those conversations that I've been a part of, I've had to bring up the fact that we need a pipeline from our K-12 institutions so that our own kids can get those high-paying jobs. That's what I mean about changing the narrative so that we talk about our children when we're talking about everything else. So if we're talking about infrastructure, talk about our children when we're talking about infrastructure. We talk about education, and it's natural. But when we're talking about health, just the economy, food deserts, just everything that we talk about so vigorously in the city, children need to be front and center. And we think that they are because of the work that we do. But in reality, if you pay close attention, they're not. And because there are so many different institutions and agencies represented here, and everybody's doing their day-to-day thing, and really don't have time to pay attention to the big umbrella meta issues. But we do. And somebody was talking about digital technology. Long gone, as a journalist, I can tell you, long gone are the days when people have to go hat in hand to the newspaper, to the television station, and please cover our agency. You can do it yourselves. You don't have to wait for anybody to tell your stories. And the easy thing is that you can do it as a part of your daily work. It's a part of your conversation. Just include technology as a part of your conversation and start building a momentum and change the narrative. It's possible. I think we can change the narrative of a city. That's a great suggestion that you made, Victor, to connect all of the things that we need to move forward in San Antonio to the conversations that we're already having. Spoken like a true journalist, go to where the conversation is and try to connect it to what we need to do. George, I'd love for you to also maybe just say a word or two about, OK, we have the data. We know what some of the solutions are. What is it going to take to build the public will and the political will here in the city and in the state of Texas to really change things? It's definitely going to take the politicians and our folks and government to make the right choices and the right decisions and to listen to the community, listen to our parents, listen to our educators that are there that are teaching. Not only our educators, our health professions as well, it's going to take a lot of decisions true and real decisions being made seriously to tackle and target the well-being of our children. So decisions have to be made, but voices have to be heard. And in order for that to happen, we need community people like Slutch to make that difference. Yeah, absolutely. And Victor, I wonder if you have any kind of final advice on how to get this data more into the conversation, more well-known, more front and center when we're thinking about solutions. Well, one of the things is find the piece of data that's more relevant to the work that you're doing and know it and use it. And just bring it up in a conversation as a part of your storytelling, as a part of, you know, people love to talk about elevator speeches. Do that. Tell a good story about the work that you're doing and back it up with data that's been presented. And it makes more of an impact, but it works best on personal one-on-one interactions, I think. You know, when you bump into people at the restaurant, you know, that everybody goes to, sometimes we're so familiar with each other we think we know what the other person knows and sometimes they don't. We need to tell them and we need to reinforce those things and bring up the kids, even if it's something as simple as, yeah, but what about the children? You know, how does this affect the children and are we looking at how this, either long-term, short-term, wherever, but how do they fit into what we're talking about? I think it's a very simple way to do it. It's a very simple question. Thank you. Well, thank you so much. We think it is so critical to be hearing the voices of people in the community, like those of you at the tables who've shared your ideas that are being generated. We're very, very delighted to have Victor and George up here as part of the conversation with their ideas. Before we close this morning's session, I just wanna say a few kind of final words of thanks and logistics because I know many of you are staying for this workshop, which is gonna be fantastic. If you love the morning, you're gonna really love the whole rest of the day too. It's gonna be fabulous. The first thing I wanna do is thank the absolutely fantastic, multi-talented staff of the Center for Public Policy Priorities. Thank you so much. You all know, you all have put on events of your own. It takes many, many, many people to make this happen. It didn't just pop up out of nowhere and we have such a wonderful, talented staff and I'm extremely grateful to be part of that organization. And I wanna also thank all of you for your commitment, for joining us in the conversation. We're very delighted that even those of you who are not able to stay with us for the full day, we're here for the morning briefing, and we're especially delighted that so many of you are staying. So we do have to make a kind of a quick turnaround. So if you all could help us do that. Jennifer is also gonna be available in the back of the room if any of you have questions. But what we wanna try to do is actually get people away from the tables fairly quickly. So our great staff here can help clear the food and then we'll welcome you back and we'll start up the workshop promptly at 10.45. So with that, thanks so much again and thanks to Jennifer again for such a great presentation. Bye.