Poverty stalks rural kids

Although Utahns on a whole continue to endure less poverty than much of the rest of the nation, new figures released Tuesday show children in the state's most rural areas are more vulnerable to the consequences of poverty because of less access to services.

While counties in Utah designated as urban represent 84 percent of the state's population, the rural counties account for 32 percent of the state's children living in poverty.

"This tends to get obscured in the fact that Utah has a relatively low level of poverty as a state," said Karen Crompton, executive director of Voices for Utah Children. "It may make us forget to look at the needs of those parts of the state where the services aren't as good."

Voices for Utah Children compiled the state data to accompany the report, "Child Poverty in Rural America," published by the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., and released this week.

While Crompton said the "rural divide" has played out publicly among lawmakers on issues like water and road development, poverty often slips below the public policy screen.

"There has always been that divide, but it has never been as highlighted for children and poverty issues," she said.

The national report said one of every five rural children across the country were living in poverty at the end of the 1990s, one of the most prosperous decades in the nation's history. That equated to more than 2.6 million children, with the study pointing out that millions more are in families just above the poverty line, having a hard time making ends meet.

Utah is ranked nationally at No. 11 for the lowest child poverty rate in the country, but several of its rural counties are struggling with double-digit percentages of child poverty that rival rural areas in such states as Oklahoma, Arkansas and Alabama.

Rural counties with child poverty rates of more than 20 percent include Duchesne, Grand, Piute, San Juan and Wayne.

San Juan's is 26.7 percent, according to Voices for Utah Children, compared to an overall rate of 24.6 percent for rural areas in Arkansas, 22.9 percent in Oklahoma and 23.1 percent in Georgia.

"Food pantries, shelters, community health clinics — that sort of infrastructure does not exist on a statewide basis the way that it does along the Wasatch Front," Crompton said.