Community Effort To Sign Up Uninsured Children For Health Coverage
By Phil Galewitz/Kaiser Health News and USA Today ST. LOUIS — On a cool weekday afternoon, a small group of young adults gathers outside Covenant House, a homeless shelter where some of them live or go to school. Armed with clipboards, they jump into a van and head out to search for their target: uninsured children. For the next three hours, the group of 20- somethings, called "door knockers," canvass a lower-income neighborhood looking for children who are eligible for two government programs: Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). “We’re in the neighborhood to sign up kids for free health care,” says Maurice Raspberry, 21, who lives at the shelter. The door knockers, who are paid $10 an hour, are part of a nationwide drive to sign up the 5 million children who qualify for the Medicaid and CHIP programs but aren’t enrolled. Children without insurance are 10 times more likely than insured children to go without needed care, a study by the Urban Institute found. The Obama administration wants all eligible children signed up by 2015. So far, the federal government has handed out $40 million in grants for enrollment initiatives, and $80 million more is on the way. |
On average, students’ GPAs drop a full letter grade between eighth and ninth grades. Students who experience this decline in GPA are by no means doomed to failure, especially if they live in neighborhoods where they can access support services. However, for students who are already struggling and lack access to help (a common scenario in low-income neighborhoods), a decline in grades during this transition makes it even harder to get on track toward graduation.
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