The negative impact on children of the very slow recovery on the Gulf Coast continues.USA Today reported the following example…
BATON ROUGE — The leader of Louisiana’s largest school system says she
believes that up to 200 children in the state’s biggest hurricane
evacuee camp are not registered in local schools. And she says the U.S.
government — citing privacy laws — is doing little to help officials
identify the youths.
Other examples comes from a recent report by Columbia University and the Children’s Health Fund which found…
- Up to 35,000 children– one-third of those across the Gulf Coast still
displaced by Hurricane Katrina – are having major problems with mental
health, behavior or school, a new study indicates.
- 10,000 displaced children across the Gulf are now suffering from
clinically diagnosed depression —a 400 percent increase from before
the storm.
- More than half the parents and caregivers interviewed reported that at
least one child had emotional or behavioral problems since the hurricane
- More than 60 percent of the parents and caregivers tested high for anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder
- Somewhere between
75,000 and 100,000 children still living in FEMA trailers
- One in six children who needed medical care for an illness or injury had not seen a doctor
- Three times as many children were without health insurance after Katrina than before the hurricane
- Nearly one-third of childrenaged 6 to 11 years had missed at least 10
days of school in one month during the last quarter of the spring 2006
semester. Four out of 10 teenagers missed that much school.
LSU Health Sciences Center compared results from screenings of children for mental health issues in August 2005, spring 2006 and this past fall finding only a drop from 49% to 41% in the cutoff score for mental health referral. A psychologist concluded they were “certainly not seeing a huge dropoff in mental health symptoms and problems.”
Dr. Irwin Redlener the director of Columbia University’s National Center said of what is occurring …“I’ve been doing advocacy and direct services for kids for more than 30 years.I’ve never seen anything like this.“
————–
It is shameful that this continues to go on… in America