New KIDS COUNT Factbook restores Newport to core city status
This story was originally published in Rhode Island Current, a publication partner of Ocean State Stories.
The latest iteration of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT’s annual Factbook contains the usual thickness of line graphs, pie charts and data tables containing no shortage of metrics and rulers meant to track the wellbeing of Ocean State youth.
The nearly 200-page edition scheduled for release at a breakfast event in Warwick Monday also includes, as it has in years past, poems inked by some of those youth. They include one by Ashton Richards, a seventh grader at the Croft School in Providence, who writes about “colors” being excised and “cultures flushed out.”
“With days growing old, and nights starting young,/this removal has just yet begun,” Richards writes.
The Rhode Island KIDS COUNT team — like its sibling state-level child advocacy nonprofits umbrellaed by the national Annie E. Casey Foundation — indeed worked with slightly less information this year, the Factbook’s overview notes.
“[R]ecently some data has been harder to obtain, no longer available, or missing key information on disparities by race, ethnicity, or the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth,” the Factbook notes, citing the discontinuation of the annual Household Food Security Report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as one example.
The Factbook’s indicators of child wellbeing are usually crafted from state or federal data sources that are consistent over time. While the indicators may change slightly over the years, they all orbit poverty in some way.
Child poverty increased 16.3% in the 2024 data, up from 13.3% in the 2023 data informing last year’s Factbook.
One of this year’s most notable additions is that the Factbook’s roster of “core cities” has increased from four to five. From 2012 through 2025, Rhode Island’s urbanmost cities — Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence and Woonsocket — comprised this list and were afforded “special attention because they are where child poverty is most concentrated,” the Factbook notes.
From 1998 through 2011, Newport had also been included as a core city. This year’s edition of the Factbook marks Newport’s return to the roster because, from 2020 to 2024, the city by the sea’s 32% child poverty rate was the second-highest in the state, outclassed only by Central Falls, according to the Factbook.
The Factbook notes that between 2020 and 2024, 69% of Rhode Island’s children living in poverty lived in these five cities.
“While estimates for Newport (and Central Falls) have a larger margin of error due to their smaller populations, the data points to important changes in the distribution of economic hardship across the state,” an executive summary of the Factbook states.
Stephanie Geller, the deputy director of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, said the reentry of Newport into the core cities list is meant to “bring attention to the needs of this community that in many ways looks more like Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence, and Woonsocket than it does like the neighboring communities of Portsmouth and Middletown.”
“When the state is deciding where to place resources, they should keep this in mind,” Geller wrote. “Newport has mansions but it also has real need.”
Colleen Burns Jermain, the superintendent of Newport Public Schools, said in an email that upon her arrival to the district in 2014, she was “surprised” to learn Newport was not considered an “urban” district in the way of other cities. She said she had grilled Rhode Island Department of Education leadership, going all the way back to the tenure of Commissioner Deborah Gist in the early 2010s, about why the district was not classified this way.
Asked about Newport’s restoration to a core city, Jermain said, “I believe it is a more accurate classification for us if you look at all the criteria that determines this — and it is about time that people understand there are two tales to the City of Newport.”
The Factbook’s executive summary notes one caveat to this poverty data, which is based on American Community Survey findings. The smaller populations of Newport and Central Falls lead to smaller sample sizes, which can widen the margin of error for these numbers, which are not exact but approximate.
Geller explained that the estimated child poverty rate for Newport is 31.7% and the margin of error is 8.38%.
“So readers should understand that there is a 90% chance that the true child poverty rate for Newport is somewhere between 23.32% and 40.08%,” Geller wrote.
Last year’s Factbook listed Newport’s child poverty rate as 25.1%, based on 2019-2023 Census data.
“The high margin of error in Newport is what made us cautious about making Newport a core city, Geller added, while also pointing out that “Newport’s child poverty rate has been the same or higher than Pawtucket” in the past few years.
Compared to the entire possible range of child poverty rates, Newport is still closer to the other core cities and higher than other municipalities, even when accounting for the margin of error, Geller said.
Pressure on families
Broader affordability struggles statewide can be gleaned from data the Factbook repurposes from the 2024 Rhode Island Standard of Need, published by the Economic Progress Institute, which estimates basic living expenses for a single-parent family with two young children in Rhode Island at about $83,239 a year. Without government subsidies, this hypothetical family would need to make $99,418 a year to meet this budgetary standard.
“At the current Rhode Island minimum wage of $16 per hour in 2026, this family would have to work 119 hours per week for 52 weeks to meet this budget,” the Factbook notes.
“Metrics such as these show that many families are struggling, not just those with incomes below the official federal poverty threshold,” Geller said, noting that benchmark was $25,938 for a family of three with two children and $32,649 for a family of four with two children in 2025.
“Families with income that are even three times that high may still be struggling to afford rent, gasoline, food, and other basic essentials,” she added.
Geller said another big concern is the price of rent, which the Factbook notes continue to rise and exceed what families can afford. She linked this to another troubling fact: During the 2024-2025 school year, Rhode Island school personnel identified 1,994 students as homeless, a 36% increase from the 2021-2022 school year.
That statistic was matched by a more than twofold increase in the number of youth experiencing homelessness without a parent or guardian, Geller said. There were 110 of these students “who were living in doubled up situations or shelters,” unaccompanied by an adult, the Factbook notes.
After USDA bows out, other food insecurity data needed
The stated mission of KIDS COUNT — to create a yearly dossier “that everyone from community leaders to policymakers to advocates [can] use to inform their planning, policymaking, and action” — has been complicated by federal changes in certain data collections.
The aforementioned Household Food Security Report, first published by the USDA in 1995, saw its final iteration published in October 2025. A USDA announcement branded the national report as “subjective, liberal fodder” which ignores the stagnation of food insecurity trends and rising SNAP spending.
The number of Rhode Island children receiving SNAP benefits has actually declined by 31% in the past decade, from a little over 60,000 children in 2016 to around 42,000 in 2025, according to the 2026 Factbook.
Geller said the organization will “have to rely on other data sources” going forward, such as the Rhode Island Community Survey and the Rhode Island Life Index produced by Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island for the data that will now be absent without the food security report.
“Problems like food insecurity, maternal mortality, and high suicide rates among LGBTQ+ youth will not go away because the data is not there, but not having the data will make it harder to improve child well-being and solve these problems together,” Geller added.
But there was also good news to share, Geller said, “including positive shifts due to state investments and policy changes.”
In federal fiscal year 2025, there were 365 children and youth awaiting psychiatric inpatient admission, also known as psychiatric boarding — a drop from 538 boarders awaiting admission in the previous fiscal year.
Geller attributed the drop to “the availability of services like Mobile Response Stabilization Services and other crisis intervention services [which are] helping to reduce unnecessary emergency room visits and hospitalizations due to mental health crises.”
There were also improvements seen in early intervention services, long plagued by sizable waiting lists. This year, Geller said that, after two Medicaid rate increases, challenges in staffing early intervention services have “significantly improved.”
“As of January 2026, 134 infants and toddlers in Rhode Island had been waiting for EI for more than 45 days, down from 283 in January 2025,” Geller said.
Besides poverty, the Factbook tracks dozens of indicators across children’s and youth’s lives, and encompassess numerous factors that influence their wellbeing from housing cost, food access and health insurance coverage to early learning, school attendance, behavioral health, juvenile justice and the child welfare system.
Also new this year is an indicator on immigrant children and youth, which an executive summary states is an acknowledgement of “their growing presence in Rhode Island and the importance of understanding their experiences.”
From 2012 to 2025, the number of public school students identified by school personnel as being immigrants has more than tripled, from 1,893 to 6,105 students, the Factbook reports.
The entire 2026 Factbook is available on the Rhode Island KIDS COUNT website.
