Nearly half of the state's 1 million residents younger than 18 "lived in some officially measured degree of poverty" last year, according to a report issued Thursday. About half of all children qualified for Medicaid benefits in any given month. And more than one-third received subsidized school meals.
The 35-page report from the Joint Citizens and Legislative Committee on Children is meant to provide lawmakers with information they can use to make policy and funding decisions, its authors said. But the report offers no concrete recommendations, only an acknowledgement of current economic challenges and the general admonition that political decisions should strike a balance between the need for budget reductions and the obligations to the state's children. It also refers to 16 Senate bills the committee has endorsed.
Lawmakers are grappling with a $700 million budget gap and have said that no state program, including services to children, is immune to cuts.
The Joint Citizens and Legislative Committee on Children was reconstituted in 2008 after a long hiatus, but went unfunded until recently. This "annual" report is the first since the early 1990s and was about a year in the making, according to Sen. Mike Fair, chairman of the committee.
The bipartisan joint committee, which consists of six appointed legislators, three appointed citizens and six state agency officials, is the only political body that considers all aspects of child welfare in South Carolina. It has an annual budget of $250,000, generated from interest earned on uncollected tax refunds, Fair said.
Data cited in the report were collected from numerous federal, state and nonprofit sources. The joint committee is a consequence of the state's Children's Policy enacted by the General Assembly. Its guidelines encourage community involvement and direct officials to take preventive action.
"The cost of prevention or intervention to resolve children's problems is almost always less expensive than the cost of failing to serve them," the report states. George Milner, a citizen member of the committee from Summerville with extensive experience in child welfare and foster care issues, said South Carolina's first priority must be the children in the state's care.
He said the committee's first task was to create "a statistical baseline."In the months ahead, committee members will promote specific initiatives and recommend changes to policy and procedure.
"Now the test of the organization will be whether or not we can ... change the slope of the curve going forward," Milner said. "This next year will decide whether the committee is committed to making lives better for youths in South Carolina, or not."