by AmeriStat staff
(AmeriStat, November 2002) In the U.S. House of Representatives that will be sworn in next January, José Serrano of New York's 16th District (which includes much of the South Bronx) will be serving the district with the highest percentage of children living in poverty in the nation: 52 percent. The 16th District is also one of the three congressional districts with the youngest populations; over a third of the residents are under age 18.
The second-highest child poverty rate is in the 20th District in California's Central Valley, which will be represented by Congressman Cal Dooley.
The third-highest child poverty rate (41 percent) in the new Congress is found back in New York's 15th District, covering Harlem and a portion of the South Bronx, which will be represented by Charles Rangel. Both the 15th and 16th districts in New York also have the highest percentages of children in single-parent households.
The district with the lowest child poverty rate in the nation, just above 3 percent, is the 6th District of Colorado, to be represented by Tom Tancredo.
Education issues should rate high among the concerns for Ed Pastor, who will represent the 4th District of Arizona (central Phoenix) in the new Congress. His district had the highest percentage of high-school dropouts in the 2000 Census of all: 31 percent of all 16-to-19-year-olds. Next came the 4th District of Illinois in central Chicago, represented by Luis Gutierrez, at 24 percent, followed by the 1st District of Colorado and the 1st District of Nevada in a virtual tie (both with more than 23 percent high-school dropouts).
The lowest percentage of dropouts (less than 3 percent) is in Congressman Henry Waxman's district, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, Calif.
Three members of California's delegation in the 108th Congress will represent the children most likely to speak languages other than English at home: Xavier Becerra for the 31st District (downtown and northeast Los Angeles); Lucille Roybal-Allard for the 34th District (portions of East Los Angeles, Downey, and Bellflower); and Loretta Sanchez for the 47th District in Orange County. Four out of every five children in these districts speaks a language other than English at home.
Following Census 2000, eight states gained one or more representatives and nine states lost representatives, according to changes in their shares of the U.S. population since the 1990 Census. All states with two or more representatives drew new district boundaries for the 2002 election (except for Maine, which will follow suit for the 2004 election) to make districts with approximately the same size populations.
For more 2000 Census data on children and families, covering each of the 435 new Congressional districts, see the KIDS COUNT website: www.kidscount.org. (The statistics for the 108th Congressional districts that appear on the KIDS COUNT website are estimates and may differ from the official statistics that will be released by the Census Bureau in 2003. PRB staff members produced the estimates for districts by summing data from Census 2000 for tracts and block groups into weighted estimates for the district(s) in which they are located.)