Our Opinion: This time, let's mean it

The Milk Party aims to nourish children

Florida has gone through many chapters of championing the well-being of children. Most of them have been received with enthusiastic lip service but little else to actually improve the education, health and safety of our youngsters.

We passed a constitutional amendment in 1998 insisting on education as a top priority of Floridians.

Yet our priorities lie elsewhere. We spend $51,000 a year to house one wayward juvenile in a detention facility, for instance. Yet we spend less than $3,000 per child on a free, voluntary pre-kindergarten program that launches children on a more stable path to adulthood, and less than $7,000 per child on elementary and secondary school.

We've also created a Children's Cabinet in Florida, an organization created by Gov. Charlie Crist to share information with other agencies about child welfare.

But it has yet to shame lawmakers into keeping Florida out of the near bottom percentile nationally of almost any measure of childhood issues.

Here in Leon County, we are fortunate to have Whole Child Leon, a wonderful program to connect parents with information and services for children, but it's local in scope.

And our whole state is letting down kids, with more than 600,000 without health insurance. Even programs such as KidCare, which offers low-cost insurance for children, go wanting for lack of marketing and outreach efforts by the state.

This month, a new, more all-encompassing — make that politically plausible — approach is being tried to bring attention to the unmet needs of children.

It's the Children's Movement of Florida and calls itself, for short, for recognition, The Milk Party.

"On Sept. 6, we'll start 15 Milk Party rallies around the state," said David Lawrence Jr., former publisher of The Miami Herald and a force behind the universal pre-K program who has raise $1 million in private donations to move this effort forward.

"We live in the age of tea parties, and they clearly have some impact, but we need a children's movement," Mr. Lawrence said. "Our mission is not about raising taxes, but rather about raising children."

So these milk-and-cookies rallies will be going on from Pensacola to Key West — on Sept. 7 here in the capital — to focus investment in children.

It has these key goals:

• Ensure health insurance for all children.
• Screen and treat children with special needs, which is one in every eight children.
• Improve the universal pre-kindergarten system.
• Advance high-quality, best-practices mentoring programs.
• Build high-quality, best-practices parenting-skill programs.

"We've got our priorities out of whack," Mr. Lawrence says, and he has some powerful bipartisan leaders behind him: former Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings, who helped found the UPK programs; Miami trial lawyer and former U.S. Attorney Bobby Martinez; former House Speakers Jon Mills and Allen Bense; and former Education Commissioner and University of South Florida President Betty Castor.

Their mission: to educate political, business and civic leaders — and all parents — about the urgent need to make the well-being and education of infants, toddlers and all other children Florida's highest priority.

The Milk Party may hold a softer, gentler kind of rally — milk and cookies instead of sound and fury — but its purpose could not be more urgent or important to the economic and societal well-being of our state.

Check its website for more information: http://childrensmovementflorida.org/

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