The Annie E Casey Foun­da­tion has released their yearly roundup of child well being in the states, called the “2009 Kids Count Report”

The lat­est sta­tis­tics in this report are from 2007 so most of the effects of the global reces­sion are not yet fac­tored into this report. How­ever, our home state of Michi­gan; that basi­cally had a one-state reces­sion before all oth­ers joined us, had a sharp increase in chil­dren liv­ing in poverty.

From the Wash­ing­ton Times arti­cle on the report, writer Carol Morello breaks down the report. For all of the stats and graphs, go to the Kids Count Data Cen­ter pro­vided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

“Our take-away is that even going into the reces­sion, the eco­nomic out­look for a lot of fam­i­lies was dire,” said Laura Beavers, the national Kids Count coor­di­na­tor. “There was a flat­ten­ing of the median income, and the poverty level was creep­ing up year after year.“

Some regional dif­fer­ences stood out. States in New Eng­land and the North­ern Plains all scored rel­a­tively high in an over­all com­pos­ite of the 10 indi­ca­tors. And the 10 states with the low­est rank­ings were all in the South or Southwest.

Both Vir­ginia and Mary­land declined in the 50-state rank­ings. Vir­ginia slipped from 15th to 16th, and Mary­land slid from 19th to 25th. The Dis­trict was not ranked because it’s a city, but it saw improve­ments almost across the board; the per­cent­age of chil­dren liv­ing in poverty, for exam­ple, decreased from 30 per­cent in 2000 to 23 per­cent in 2007. The decline might be a reflec­tion of poor fam­i­lies being priced out of gen­tri­fy­ing neighborhoods.

In an omi­nous har­bin­ger of the future, states that were roiled by eco­nomic dif­fi­cul­ties early in the decade saw the dra­matic effect a wors­en­ing econ­omy has on children.

In Michi­gan, for exam­ple, the rate of chil­dren liv­ing in poverty rose by more than a third, from 14 per­cent in 2000 to 19 per­cent in 2007. In Ohio, the num­ber went up by almost a fifth in the same period, from 16 per­cent to 19 percent.

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