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prevails on many of South Dakota's Indian reservations.
• Sherry Salway Black, a tribal governance expert with the National Congress of American Indians, described the South Dakota score as "horrendous," but said she was impressed by initiatives on some of the reservations that could help children and families.
• In particular, she praised native-run community development financial institutions for seeking to improve youth employment and provide young people with financial literacy education.
• "It's a beacon of hope," she said.
• The Casey report cited several other initiatives around the United States that appeared to hold promise for improving the prospects of disadvantaged children. Among them:
• --An innovative school funding system in California -- the Local Control Funding Formula -- which enables school districts to receive extra money based on such factors as child poverty and the number of children in the foster care system.
• --The Family and Child Education Program launched by Parents as Teachers, a St. Louis-based advocacy and outreach group, to improve reading and math proficiency among American Indian children. Casey said the program is now offered in 45 Bureau of Indian Education Schools.
• --Volunteers of America's Look Up and Hope initiative, launched in 2009 to help support children with a mother in prison. It provides incarcerated mothers, their children and their children's caregivers with up to five years of comprehensive services, including home visits and individualized support from a case manager.
• Ken Taylor of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families expressed hope that the state's low score for black children would serve as an alarm bell -- both for Wisconsin and the whole country -- to galvanize politicians, community leaders, nonprofits and employers into action.
• "Historically, we're a state that invests in kids, invests in education," he said. "Are we still that kind of state? That's an open question."
• Improvements, he said, should be pursued with a sense of urgency, but also with the understanding that progress would take years.
• "We need to be supporting kids from birth on ... we also need to get parents from communities of color into family-supporting jobs," he said. "We need a two-generation approach."
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