The Children's Agenda Surveys Voter Priorities
The Children's Agenda, an activist group dedicated to improving the lives of children by advancing policy and practices, hired Children's Institute (CI) to research how Monroe County voters prioritize children, and the relative importance of several children's issues.
After developing an in-depth questionnaire, CI hired a well-reputed phone bank to poll voters between October 8th and November 8th, 2001. Over 400 voters responded to the poll.
Top Priorities for Elected Officials
Voters responded that the top three priorities for elected officials are attracting businesses and jobs (27%), improving the lives of children (23%), and reducing crime (20%).
Top Children-related Priorities
Voters believe the community's top children-related priority should be improving the quality of education (31%), followed by reducing child abuse and eliminating children's exposure to violence (23%).
A large plurality of voters (42%) think that families, not any particular level of government, should be primarily responsible for selecting the top children's issue. Two-thirds (66%) of voters believe that more spending is required on children's issues, but the majority would rather shift money from other issues to children's issues (52%) than raise taxes (20%).
Issue-based Priorities
When asked about the following issues that impact children, voters identified their priorities for each:
Education
- Encouraging more parental involvement (43%)
Child poverty
- Encouraging adults to serve as positive role models (28%)
- Getting drug dealers off the street (20%)
Child care
- Mandating better monitoring of health and safety standards (24%)
- Instituting a higher minimum wage for child care workers (20%)
- Mandating more training for child care workers (19%)
- Ensuring affordable child care through subsidies (17%)
Health care
- Ensuring that health insurance is affordable for all children (57%)
- Juvenile justice
- Offering more after-school and summer activities (28%)
- Increasing the number of positive alternatives to incarceration (26%)
- Improving delinquency prevention efforts (22%)
Juvenile justice
- Offering more after-school and summer activities (28%)
- Increasing the number of positive alternatives to incarceration (26%)
- Improving delinquency prevention efforts (22%)
Interestingly, while voters overall say that education is the top children's issue, those with children (up to 17 years old) say they are pleased with their schools. Almost three-quarters of parents give their child's education a grade of A or B.
Clearly, the Children's Agenda Poll shows that relative to other priorities, children are very important to likely voters in Monroe County. On December 13, 2001, Dirk Hightower and Michael Epstein of CI presented these results to an audience of local politicians, media, school officials, and representatives of various social service agencies, charities, and religious institutions.
The following results data set and related survey questionnaire materials are available for download. For further information, please contact Children's Institute.
