Connecting a face with an issue confronting a community helps make it seem more real, rather than just a statistic.
More than a 1.59 million Hoosiers are under the age of 17 — kids. Of those, 21,784 live in Vigo County.
All with different faces, names, needs and backgrounds.
A snapshot of those young people and their situations unfolds in the newly released 2025 Kids Count Data Book. The Indiana Youth Institute has compiled the report annually for the past 31 years, pulling together numbers from a variety of sources. The Kids Count is part of a national network of statewide reports for the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
“It tells us where we’re succeeding and where we’re failing,” IYI President and CEO Tami Silverman said in the report. “It tells us where we can do better for our kids.”
Closer to home, it also provides that report card for Vigo County. The community gets some high marks and some low.
It’s important to consider more than just one shining success or a single low point.
“For the well-being of our kids, we can’t look at just one thing,” Ashley Haynes, IYI’s vice president of data and communications, said by phone Friday.
The 146-page Kids Count Data Book features four primary categories. Indiana has its own struggles in those areas and some good points. Nationally, Indiana ranks 15th for its kids’ economic well-being, 17th for education, 31st for family and community, and 32nd for health.
“Health is definitely a big area where there’s a lot of room to grow and support kids in our state,” Haynes said.
That’s true for Vigo County and its kids.
The Terre Haute area stands out for its primary-care physician ratio of one doctor for every 1,204 residents, seventh-best in Indiana. Vigo also ranks in the upper-half of Indiana counties for its mental health providers-per-resident ratio (17th), dentists-per-resident ratio (23rd) and kids immunized (41st). Vigo rated more middle-of-the-pack for infant mortality (48th) and mothers receiving prenatal care (54th).
The percentage of kids in grades 7 through 12 using alcohol, marijuana, vapes and cigarettes also is relatively low for the 10-county region that includes Vigo, ranking first or second lowest, according to Kids Count.
Vigo ranks poorly, though, for the number of low birth-weight infants (73rd) and youth suicides (82nd).
Education also includes a mixed bag of outcomes for this community. The most encouraging education rankings for Vigo come in the availability of school counselors for kids (1 counselor for every 116 students, second-best in the state); teacher retention rate (90.7% in the classroom in 2023 returned for 2024, 14th-best) and early education enrollment (44.2% of 3- to 4-year-olds, 29th-best).
Vigo also shines for college enrollment at ninth-best with 60.9% of the Class of 2022 enrolled in college.
On the flipside, the Kids Count report signals some areas to improve. Vigo ranks near the bottom, 89th of the 92 counties, in chronic absences with 26% missing 10% of the school year or more. Also low were the local rankings for SAT reading-and-writing and math scores (both 84th), bullying incidents (78th), high school graduation rate (77th) and high school dropout rate (72nd), according to the report.
The family-and-community category indicates perhaps Vigo County’s hardest struggles.
Perhaps its best situation is the percentage of grandparents living with and responsible for the care of their grandkids. In Vigo, 47.4% of grandparents were their grandchildren’s caregivers, the 44th-best in Indiana, but above the state rate of 41.8%.
Tougher outcomes pervade in other areas. Vigo ranks 86th for youths in foster care (657 kids in 2024, up from 599 in 2023); 86th in children removed from households (309 in ‘24, up from 231 in ‘23); 86th for children in need of child services (665 in ‘24, up from 633 in ‘23); 80th in teen births; 78th in households without a vehicle; 74th in juvenile case filings for delinquency and 71st for households without an internet subscription (19.9%).
Vigo ranked 33rd for the number of kids with tests showing elevated lead levels.
On the report’s overall social vulnerability index, Vigo ranks 87th. It reflects the potential negative effects on communities caused by external stresses on human health, such as natural or human-caused disasters, or disease outbreaks.
Given Vigo County’s relatively low median family income — 13th-lowest at $73,202 — this community’s rankings in kids’ economic well-being aren’t surprising.
Vigo ranked 90th-best for youth employment with 27.9% of 16- to 24-year-olds working for regular pay. Also, Vigo is 90th on the food-access index; 89th for children living in poverty at 24.8% and rising; 88th for children in food insecurity; 88th in high housing costs for rents and 84th for mortgages; 86th for children on free- and reduced lunches; 85th for childcare cost-to-income ratio; 82nd for kids in families receiving SNA P benefits and 73rd for kids in households with no one employed in the past year.
There’s a lot to consider within all those numbers. Each affects multiple local kids. Many hard-working adults are already trying to improve the situations. The report can reinforce or redirect those efforts.
As IYI’s Tami Silverman put it, the Kids Count report “is a measure of how we value our children. It is really a report card for adults.”
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