By 2007, the children of Memphis and Shelby County, Tennessee were in crisis. Thirty percent of the states children were born in Shelby County alone, and 50 percent of these children were being born into poverty each year. In this essay, Michael Schmidt and Julie Coffey detail the strategy to combat the child welfare issues of the county by the creation and implementation of Shelby County Child Impact Statement Reporting System, a web-based software application that evaluates the effectiveness of policy decisions on behalf of children.
