Every year, GEEARS publishes the Early Childhood Checkup, an assessment of Georgia’s support for its youngest children and their families. With a quick scan of cute baby faces shaded green, red, or yellow, Georgians can see if certain indicators have shown improvement, declined, or remained static.
While we’re pleased by the green babyface that indicates an increase in the percentage of Quality Rated licensed early learning providers, two negative trends leap out of the 2025 Checkup’s Health & Well-being section.
Only 62% of Georgia children received their recommended seven-vaccine series by age 35 months, down a whopping 8.3% from the last recorded measurement.
GEEARS’ Senior Health Policy Manager, Callan Wells, attributes the decline to multiple factors. “Not surprisingly,” she says, “a significant drop occurred during the pandemic, when fewer families brought their children in for routine well-child visits.
“The reasons for this are complex and multifaceted,” Wells says. “They include a shortage of pediatric providers in many rural areas, challenges navigating complicated systems, trepidation about the health care system, and lapses in health insurance coverage due to difficulties maintaining continuous enrollment, especially in Georgia where nearly eight percent of children are uninsured, ranking us 42nd in the nation.”
Scott Thorpe, Executive Director of the Southern Alliance for Public Health Leadership, agrees that our state’s vaccination decline is particularly problematic.
“This is a growing problem across the United States, but Georgia is a clear outlier,” he says. “This past year, only 86.8% of kindergarteners received their MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine]. That’s lower than any other state in the South. We also know these rates aren’t evenly spread across the state. There are many counties and many schools and daycares with much, much lower vaccination rates. When vaccination rates fall and outbreaks start, our families, our healthcare system, and our state’s economy pay the price.”
“Outbreaks, especially in child care settings,” Wells echoes, “not only threaten children’s health but also disrupt families’ lives when parents must stay home from work to care for their sick children.”
The number of children living in households that were food insecure at some point during the year increased to 22%.
Put another away, almost a quarter of Georgia’s youngest children, who critically need adequate nutrition to meet their developmental needs, were living in households in which access to that nutrition was uncertain or altogether out of reach.
At a time when the cost of living, including the price of food, is skyrocketing; at a time when the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) faces changes that will almost certainly lead to benefit cuts, this already-high number seems likely to grow.
According to the National Institutes of Health, food insecurity can lead to myriad consequences for young children, from worse overall health to developmental delays to a decline in social-emotional and cognitive functioning.
And yet, the passage of HR 1 has ensured that the states will have to assume some SNAP funding and administration duties that were previously solely the federal government’s responsibility.
The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute(GBPI) notes that “While the bill does not outright cut SNAP benefits, certain provisions would still lead to cuts to many households, who could lose some or all of their benefits.
“Some . . . have made arguments that Georgia’s multibillion-dollar surplus will allow the state to absorb these new costs. This is not a viable option: Even if Georgia’s surplus is tapped, it is not a sustainable way to backfill the magnitude of federal funding cuts that would be shifted to Georgia’s state budget over the long term.”
In its measures of the decline in food security and vaccination rates, the Early Childhood Checkup is giving all who care about early childhood a mandate for action. That’s why GEEARS is specifically including protection of early childhood immunizations and food security in our 2026 legislative policy agenda. We’ll urge lawmakers to protect timely, affordable access to early childhood vaccines and safeguard accurate, evidence-based information about them. These measures will protect the health and safety of our youngest Georgians and ensure that early care and learning settings remain open and safe.
And because more than 600,000 Georgia children, including more than 200,000 under age six, rely on SNAP to access nutritious food, we’ll join partners in advocating that the legislature allocate an additional $50 million in state funding for SNAP administrative operations, a solution that will mitigate new federal funding restrictions. Without this investment, we risk a reduction in federal SNAP dollars and disruptions for Georgia families that could leave children hungry.
Click here to check out the Early Childhood Checkup. Please use it to craft your own advocacy priorities, then use GEEARS’ action alerts to contact your lawmakers on behalf of Georgia’s youngest children.
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