San Juan, Puerto Rico – The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., is launching an online database on children and youth in Puerto Rico as part of The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s CLIKS (Community-Level Information on Kids) Online Data System. NCLR’s KIDS COUNT – Puerto Rico Project has compiled statistics on children and youth in Puerto Rico, including major demographic, social, and economic characteristics, as well as data on children’s health and adolescent concerns. The information – which is available online at http://kidscount.nclr.org – contains data for both the Island as a whole and for the 78 municipios, or local municipalities.

“This database will fill an important need for reliable statistics on such issues as the health and socioeconomic status of children in Puerto Rico. The addition of Puerto Rico data to CLIKS means that a powerful tool is available to help everyone, from parents to community leaders to policy makers to service providers, to monitor the status and well-being of children on the Island,” stated Janet Murguia, NCLR President and CEO.

While the KIDS COUNT – Puerto Rico Project published many of these data in its 2004 KIDS COUNT – Puerto Rico Data Book, the new online database will include information not previously available – such as the rate of teen deaths by accidents, homicides, and suicides from 1990 to 2000, for the Island as a whole, and for each municipio. For example, while Puerto Rico reported 67 deaths from these causes per 100,000 adolescents 15 to 19 years of age in 2000, rates at the municipio level ranged between 30 and 250 deaths per 100,000.

Visitors to the CLIKS – Puerto Rico website can generate profiles on the well-being of children in Puerto Rico and in any specific municipio, view social indicators graphed on timelines, and create color-coded maps. The ranking feature allows the user to view each municipio’s ranking per indicator and compare it to the Island’s median. NCLR has produced profiles for each of the ten municipios that have the largest populations under the age of 18.

“Now decision-makers have key information at their fingertips and we hope they will use this knowledge to make the right choices for improving the lives of Puerto Rico’s children and youth,” concluded Murguia.

The main CLIKS website, run by The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s CLIKS Online Data System and located online at www.aecf.org/cgi-bin/clik.cgi, also presents data on children from most of the 50 U.S. states and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The KIDS COUNT – Puerto Rico Project is supported, in part, by The Annie E. Casey Foundation. For more information on the KIDS COUNT – Puerto Rico Project, please visit http://kidscount.nclr.org. For more information on NCLR, please visit www.nclr.org.

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