Hundreds of thousands of kids could be missed by the 2020 Census. These N.J. towns will be affected most. – NJ.com

Don’t forget the baby.

That’s what advocates and officials in New Jersey are stressing ahead of the 2020 U.S. Census: Don’t forget to count children between infancy and 5 years old.

Kids that young are among the groups most likely to missed by the once-a-decade survey of U.S. residents, and new data shows that nearly 500,000 young children in New Jersey are at risk of being missed.

State officials say they’re taking action to make sure New Jersey’s kids get counted.

“I’m a mom of a 5 year-old. It’s very important we try to reach that hard-to-count population,” Secretary of State Tahesha Way told NJ Advance Media. “Adults might not realize that their babies, their toddlers are supposed to be counted by the Census.”

Advocates say vital federal programs, like monthly checks for low-income moms to buy food for their children, as well as programs like Head Start, could be hurt if children in New Jersey aren’t fully counted.

“If we don’t count them, those federal programs that are there to serve those families and those children will be impacted for the next 10 years,” Regi Dorsey, the outreach specialist for Advocates for Children of New Jersey, said at an event last week.

Data collected by the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research group, and analyzed by NJ Advance Media, shows that more than 140 New Jersey neighborhoods and towns have a “very high risk” of undercounting their young children.

The group produced risk assessment data for each Census tract in New Jersey and NJ Advance Media matched each tract with its corresponding town or neighborhood. Weighing factors like the poverty rate, the number of single-parent or non-English-speaking households and other factors, the Population Reference Bureau projected how many young children could slip through the cracks.

For example, the data shows that in Jersey City’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, in the collection of blocks along West Side Avenue, more than 1,200 children are at risk of being undercounted.

NJ Advance Media identified 92 cities and towns where both a significant amount of children live and where those children are at risk of being missed by the Census count. The full dataset can be downloaded here, from the Population Reference Bureau’s website.

In total, around 194,000 New Jersey kids live in the areas deemed to be “very high risk,” out of about 4 million nationally.

An additional 303,000 New Jersey children live in areas deemed a “high risk” of being undercounted, the data shows, ranging from Garden State cities to its smallest communities.

In Newark, Jersey City, Paterson and Elizabeth, a combined 46,600 children are deemed to be at a “very high risk.” An additional 4,500 children from some of New Jersey’s smallest towns — those with less than 2,000 residents — are also at a “very high risk.”

The Population Reference Bureau also produced data showing which counties have the highest risk of undercounting their children. In six New Jersey counties — Mercer, Union, Cumberland, Hudson, Essex and Passaic — more than half of the children ages 0-5 live in those “very high risk” areas.

“We do know that kids are not generally missed because the households are missed,” said Mark Mather, one of the researchers with the Population Reference Bureau. “It’s likely the household was counted but the kids were left off.”

That could happen because a child lives in multiple homes or lives in a “complex household,” which could mean everything from living with grandparents to an immediate and extended family living under one roof.

Andrew Reamer, a researcher at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. who studies the link between Census data and funding for federal programs, said that some, but not all, of the programs that benefit young children and families could be affected by an undercount.

For example, he said, programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program are based on total population counts, meaning they’re only affected if the entire population of a state is undercounted. If you don’t fill out your form, he said, everyone is affected.

Other programs, though, like Women, Infants and Children which provides families with monthly welfare checks for food, are based on the count of poor people in an area. If a wealthy person doesn’t fill out their Census form, WIC funding isn’t hurt. But if there’s an undercount of children 0-5, that funding could be affected.

In fiscal year 2016, Reamer estimated that New Jersey received $151 million from the federal government for its WIC programs.

Way, the secretary of state and chair of New Jersey’s Complete Count Commission, said state education officials will be asking schools to send students home with information about the census. The State Department has distributed more than $3.1 million in grants to counties and nearly $2 million in grants to individual non-profit organizations that work with vulnerable communities, officials said.

The state Health Department and Department of Children and Families will assist in setting up so-called Census Kiosks which will allow residents to fill out the Census on-site, likely in a community space, Way said.

J. Dale Shoemaker is a reporter on the data & investigations team. He can be reached at jshoemaker@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JDale_Shoemaker.

Disha Raychaudhuri may be reached at disha@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @Disha_RC.