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It's always the highlight of a week when
I get to greet Sheboygan County visitors at the Capitol! We have a
rich history in Wisconsin that is worth reliving and passing down to our
future leaders.
It's appropriate that this week's
newsletter is all about Wisconsin's young people, because so much of the
activity in the Capitol these days is (rightly) aimed at investing in
our future. Whether we're looking at our child welfare system
through the Speaker's Task Force on Foster Care, showing a homeschool
student the Assembly floor where so much history has been made, meeting
with undergraduate and graduate students to discuss the future of
occupational licensing and health care or engaging in a community
dialogue about teaching financial literacy to students young and old,
we're investing time and resources now to give our citizens better
opportunities later. (Yes, every one of these things happened this
week!)
As always, I encourage you to follow
my updates on
social media or contact
my office directly with your questions. Best wishes on your
weekend!
A
Message from Ambassador Jordy Nelson
Did you see Jordy Nelson's huge touchdown
reception in the fourth quarter of the Packers' big win over the Cowboys
last weekend? I bet you didn't know that, just two days prior, Jordy
and his wife Emily had
formally adopted a San Antonio child into their
family.
Jordy serves as an ambassador for the
Jockey Being Family
Foundation, a charity that provides funding to other national and local
adoption-related nonprofit organizations. Last week, the Nelsons
adopted baby girl Adda Jo, whom they had been fostering since her birth
seven months ago, and are now a family of five (along with biological son
Royal and adopted son Brooks). Click on the image at right to watch
Jordy speak about his family's experience with adoption and what a typical
day in the busy Nelson household looks like.
Coincidentally, the
Speaker's Task Force on Foster Care (on which I serve as a member) will
visit Green Bay soon for the next in our series of on-the-road public
hearings to investigate what more can be done in Wisconsin to serve our
children. More than 7,000 Wisconsin children live in out-of-home
foster care, the majority of whom have suffered neglect or abuse; in many
cases, these kids need nothing more than a loving home to give them a chance
to succeed. Thank you, Nelson family, for speaking up so powerfully
for these vulnerable young people!
Kids
Count
I've always recognized that Wisconsin is a
great place to live, work and raise a family, and new numbers put some
science behind it. The Annie E. Casey Foundation's
"Kids
Count Data Book" recently ranked Wisconsin as the 12th best state in the
nation for the overall well-being of our children.
The statistics are both encouraging and
sobering. The ranking is based on 16 criteria that measure children's
economic well-being, education, health and family and community. In
almost every category, Wisconsin's young people outperform national averages
and are doing better than they were five years ago. For example, the
teen birthrate in Wisconsin dropped from 26 per 1,000 in 2010 to just 16 in
2015. That's great progress! In other areas, though, there is
much more work yet to be done: fully 63 percent of our fourth graders are
not proficient in reading and 59 percent are not proficient in math.
(That's still better than national averages... but we can still do a lot
better.)
Investments in our children and families are
having positive impacts! We're moving in the right direction but still
have plenty more that we can do to give every child a chance at a brighter
future.
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