Building workforce starts with baby steps

Tarrant County is a booming community. People want to move, work and live here. Businesses want their patronage or expertise.

The future looks rosy for Tarrant County except for one glaring blemish.

For a community to continuously prosper, it has to have new generations of educated, healthy workers to continue the work of their predecessors.

Tarrant County’s future lies in the children who live here now, and it isn’t looking great.

Child Care Associates has compiled extensive data on the lives of Tarrant County infants and toddlers.

More than 111,000 infants and toddlers, ages 0-3, live in Tarrant County. One of out four of these children lives in a household without reliable and sufficient access to nutritious food.

The number of Fort Worth kids growing up in poverty rose 9 percent in the last five years, more than in other Texas cities.

“The longer children live in poverty, the worse their adult outcomes are likely to be, including employment,” says the study, “The First 1,000 Days: A Briefing on Infants and Toddlers in Tarrant County – 2017.”

Tarrant County also has the highest rate of child abuse, neglect and infant mortality in the state. Of those children affected, 81 percent exhibited at least one psychological disorder by the age of 21.

Those are dark odds for a significant number of children to overcome.

“As a community, we have to have an educated workforce for us to succeed. So the whole community needs to realize that schools can’t do it alone and individual families can’t do it alone,” Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price says in a CCA video.

But knowing is half the battle in this case, and CCA, along with other North Texas organizations, provided the information.

Now we have a better idea of the problem.

One of the report’s recommendations was more accessibility of high-quality pre-K for every student. The Fort Worth Independent School District has been working diligently on it, and Gov. Greg Abbott made it one of his budget priorities this session.

Blue Zones Project helps eliminate food deserts, and an aggressive homelessness plan aids families.

Progress has been made, but more will be needed.

This story was originally published February 3, 2017 at 7:07 PM with the headline "Building workforce starts with baby steps."