Organization rates city as among tops in child
friendliness
By JERRY DANIEL REED / Abilene Reporter-News
Abilene has been adjudged an all-right city by a somewhat unlikely
source, Zero Population Growth.
To create The Children's Environmental Index, ZPG sized up
219 cities in the 100,000-plus population category. And after
all factors were assigned their proper statistical weights, Abilene
weighed in at No. 48. That's within the top quadrant, or 25 percent,
of the cities surveyed.
"It's always nice to end up looking good," said Ray
Ferguson, Abilene mayor pro tem, although adding that he generally
takes such surveys with a grain of salt.
The 219 U.S. cities were ranked on five indicators, each including
two or three sub-indicators. Abilene was rated good to excellent
on physical environment, education, and crime factors, but only
fair to mediocre in health and economic factors.
Abilene ranked very high in physical environment, mainly because
the city suffers no "bad air" days from pollution, and
it's located far from any toxic waste site.
In the crime category, Abilene stacks up well for its relatively
low rates of violent crime and property crime, although its juvenile
arrest rate is only middling.
In education, Abilene's 13.6-to-1 student-teacher ratio is
the lowest of the 21 listed Texas cities, and its 12.8 percent
dropout rate is a respectable ninth best in state.
In health, Abilene's notoriously high teen birth rate -- 20.3
percent, 26th highest of the 219 cities analyzed -- cancels out
commendable marks for low birth weight infants (fifth lowest in
Texas) and number of family physicians and general practitioners
per 10,000 population (fourth highest in the state), to produce
an overall mediocre result.
A low median income (sixth from the bottom in Texas) and a
relatively high percentage of children in poverty (eighth highest
in the state) offset a respectable unemployment rate of 5.4 percent,
to give Abilene its less-than-sterling rating in economics.
Ferguson said that selection of criteria to measure by is necessarily
subjective. Asthma sufferers, for example, might count a few more
than zero "bad air" days around here, he said.
On the other hand, he said material wealth could be overrated
as an indicator because some people may sacrifice financially
to live in a particular community.
He's seen some high school friends who couldn't wait to leave
Abilene who later couldn't wait to come back.
"Now that I'm raising kids, I don't mind taking a cut
in pay to come here," Ferguson said he's heard some say.
He also suggested that calculating the percentage of children
who grow up with both parents could have been another valid measure
of child well-being.
Despite its name, Zero Population Growth did not rate the cities
according to how close they actually come to achieving its ideal.
If low- or no-growth were the key, mushrooming Plano would have
ranked nowhere near fourth nationally (as it did) on the index,
nor first in Texas and in the South.
In fact, in the September issue of <I>The ZPG Reporter<I>,
author Joy Fishel concedes that "children are better off
living in cities with higher rates of population growth,"
but adds:
"(T)his does not mean that a better quality of life is
a result of population growth."
Rather, high population growth has been most common in recent
years in those upscale big-city suburbs that enjoy the ample resources
to help them achieve lower rates of crime, infant mortality, teen
births, and school dropout rates, Fishel writes. Those are precisely
the indicators, she notes, that mark a city as "kid-friendly"
on the ZPG scale.
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Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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