New study finds more than a third of Alaska's children live in poverty

(App users, to view the interactive data visualization, follow this

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Data is sourced from the KIDS COUNT Data Center. Recently released was their full report for

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Use the interactive data visualization, above, to:

• Examine the percent change in Alaska's regional child population, from 2001 and 2015.

• Examine where Alaska's children lived regionally in 2016, between the ages of 0 to 19.

• Compare the regional percentages of children who live in families with incomes below the Federal Poverty Level – using a five-year estimate from 2011 through 2015.

• And examine Alaska's differences between median family incomes by race and ethnicity, from 2015.

A recent study shows 58,000 of Alaska's children are living in households with a high housing cost burden relative to their parent's income, and more than 26,000 live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level according to newly released data.

Published by the Alaska Children's Trust, the 2018 Kids Count report measures the overall well-being of Alaska's children using multiple sources of data from the previous calendar year.

Andrew Cutting, Program Fellow for Alaska Children's Trust, said disproportionately high housing costs can have a lasting impact on children.

"You should not spend more than 30 percent of your budget on housing and a lot of families are spending half their budget on that," Cutting said.

According to the annual report card, 13,000 children in Alaska have at least one parent who is actively looking for work, and 10,000 children live in high poverty neighborhoods.

The report finds that in 2017, 20 percent of Alaska's children lived in homes without enough food.

Kim Kovol, Deputy Director for Children's Lunchbox -- a program run by Bean's Cafe -- said they organization provides around 3,000 bags of food to children at Title I schools serving low income communities.

Kovol said in many families, the parents are working full time or looking for work, and are trying to make tough decisions between paying for gas, electricity, or putting food on the table.