7-8-13 children's welfare

A spokesman for the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families says there’s nothing to get too excited about in the latest Kid’s Count Data book that track’s children’s welfare.  The report says children’s lives are improving in Wisconsin, but many families remain worse off than before the

Great Recession.  But Bob Jacobson says almost one in five Wisconsin children lives in poverty.  The report says Wisconsin ranks 12^th in the nation as a place to grow up, but Jacobson says that ranking can be misleading.  "We gained in rank in this year's book largely because of our big jump in one of the four categories, the health care category,"  Jacobson said.  "That's actually a statistical quirk, it comes from one indicator which has to due with teen alcohol and drug abuse where a whole bunch of states were clustered together and so our small improvement resulted in a jump in rank."