There’s Good And Bad News For Kids In Newark, New Report Says

NEWARK, NJ — There is some good and bad news for the nearly 74,000 youth under age 18 who live in New Jersey’s largest city, a new report says.

Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ) recently released its annual Newark Kids Count report for 2024, which gives an update about critical data that impacts children in Newark, including education, family income and health care.

As in previous years, the analysis proved to be a mixed bag, researchers said. View the full report online here.

With fewer families living below the poverty line, a decrease in unemployment and an increase in median household income (which is still “starkly” lower than the state median), Newark is making progress in some areas of child well-being – but losing ground in others, the ACNJ said.

One of them? Recovering from the “learning loss” seen during the COVID pandemic, president and CEO Mary Coogan said.

“As we continue to recover from the pandemic, learning loss has also been especially significant, with 81 percent of Newark third graders not meeting proficiency in reading and 89 percent of eighth graders not meeting proficiency in math,” Coogan said. See Related: Newark Has Plan To Improve ‘Alarming’ Student Reading Scores

Coogan noted that this year’s report is being made available in Spanish for the first time. Roughly 42 percent of the city’s children identified as Hispanic or Latino and 22 percent of its public school students identified as multilingual learners — more than double the state average.

Here are some highlights from the 2024 report:

Demographics

• Nearly 74,000 children under age 18 call Newark home, with 48% identified as Black or African American, 42% identified as Hispanic or Latino, and 23% identified as some other race.
• The city’s child population makes up 24% of its total population.
• Roughly 55% of all births in the city were to foreign-born women, and of those births, 64% were of Hispanic descent.
• Nearly 20,000, or 53%, of all Newark households with children are headed by one parent.

Family Economic Security

• Newark’s median family income is $45,803 – a stark difference from New Jersey’s median income of nearly $120,874.
• In 2023, roughly 1,644 Newark children lived in families receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), more commonly referred to as welfare. This is a 25% decrease from 2019. TANF provides cash assistance to needy families through a federally funded block grant given to individual states.

Child Health

• Just 51% of expectant mothers in Newark received early prenatal care in 2022, compared to Essex’s 60% and New Jersey’s 73%.
• In 2022, 26% of all births, in both Newark and the state of New Jersey, were low-risk cesarean deliveries.
• The Newark infant mortality rate, the rate at which a baby dies before their first birthday, was 6.8 for every 1,000 live births in 2017-2021 but, data disaggregated by race shows the infant mortality rate much higher for Black babies (9.4 per 1,000 births) and much lower for babies identified as Hispanic (3.6 per 1,000 births).
• The number of children in Newark under age 6 tested for lead declined at least 14% between 2018 and 2022, and in 2022, only 10 of the 33 confirmed cases where homes required lead abatement were completed.

Child Protection

• As of 2023, 1,633 Newark children were under Child Protection and Permanency (CP&P, formerly DYFS) supervision, which reflects a 47% decrease since 2019.
• The number of Newark children living in foster care declined from 560 in 2019 to 225 in 2023.

Child Care

• Newark has 131 child care centers, representing 27% of Essex County’s licensed child care centers.
• The number of Newark’s registered family child care providers, those who care for children in their own homes, is 94, a 40% decline since 2019.
• Newark saw a 54% decrease in the number of families receiving state-funded home visitation, from 386 families participating in 2019 to 177 in 2023.

Education

• Special education enrollment for Newark Charter Schools has increased by 19% since the 2018-19 school year, while Newark Public Schools saw a 4% decrease. However, there are still more children in special education in Newark Public Schools with 6,315 enrolled compared to Charter Schools with 2,185 enrolled.
• In the 2022-23 school year, 22% of Newark Public School students were multilingual learners, more than double than that of the state.
• Only 19% of Newark Public School third grade students are meeting or exceeding expectations for English Language Arts in the state New Jersey State Student Assessment.
• The high school graduation rate for Newark Public Schools was 86% for the 2022-23 school year, less than the state average of 91%.

Teens

• Newark saw a 34% decrease in teen births, from 291 births in 2018 to 192 births in 2022.
• Juvenile arrests fell from 340 in 2019 to 296 in 2023.

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