Louisiana Last in the Nation For At-Risk Youth

Sure, we can do a lot of things better in Louisiana, but this might take the cake.

We spend our days arguing over silly political stances on Facebook. Look at your timeline lately. It's all bickering from across party lines and it's sad. It's sad that we spend so much time and energy arguing over matters that ironically don't matter in the grand scheme of things. While at the same time, our kids are struggling. If I was a politician Louisiana, big or small, I would immediately drop everything and focus on our kids, because they are our future, and they should be the most important thing to us.

This study made me sad. There's no other way to put it. Sure, Louisiana has generally fared poorly in surveys and studies like this. We perform poorly compared to other states in many important categories, such as crime rate and obesity, yet this study in particular stung me harder than any one that came before.

Louisiana, according to WalletHub, is the worst state in the country for at-risk youth.

WalletHub set out to, "determine the places where young Americans are not faring as well as others in the same age group." Their findings are absolutely troublesome for our state, and there's no other way to look at it. They compared all 50 states using 15 indicators of youth risk.

Some of those metrics were:

• Poverty
• Teen Pregnancy
• Those 16-24 Who Are in the Labor Force.
• Overall Health Factors
• Homeless Youth
• Youth with Depression

When they crunched their numbers and added up their findings, they found that Louisiana was the worst state of the whole bunch. Mississippi, Nevada, Alabama, and West Virginia rounded out worst five.

Our kids deserve better than what we're giving them in Louisiana.