Our children shouldn’t live this way.

They shouldn’t have to play at contaminated abandoned industrial sites because their neighborhoods have no green space. They shouldn’t be at risk of dying before their first birthday because the color or their skin makes getting health care difficult. They shouldn’t go to schools where there is no learning and where their parents’ greatest hope is that they don’t join a gang or get attacked.

They shouldn’t be well on their way to becoming hardened criminals by age 11, or be forced to drop out of high school because they got pregnant.

Our Children shouldn’t live this way. But they do, especially in big cities like Cleveland. And it seems we have grown accustomed to it.

A few years back, Joan Mazzolini and I and a group of Plain Dealer reporters took an exhaustive look at our nation’s most at-risk citizens – the half million children who call greater Cleveland home.

We set out to precisely assess the problems children in Cleveland face.

For example, we found that half a million Ohio children live next door to a toxic waste site. We visited the neighborhoods with the most dangerous sites and found youngsters playing in abandoned factories.

We found that nearly 1 million children in Ohio live in what we defined as poor housing, putting them at greater risk for fires, accidents and environmental health hazards such as lead poisoning and asthma.

We found that babies born to teenage mothers are much more likely to be premature, and that those babies had cost Ohio roughly $161 million in five years. We found that in some inner-city neighborhoods infants are dying at rates that rival Third World countries like Guatemala.

And we found that children of color were most in danger.

and the blog picks up here:

http://tinyurl.com/y9a79zq

Stephen