Report: 18 states and D.C. fail to meet emergency standards for kids

Are we prepared to protect our children? Eighteen states and the District of Columbia still fall short on at least one basic element of kids' care in Save the Children's state-by-state, child evacuation plans for major disasters.

As of 2015, 32 states have met all elements of Save the Children's criteria compared to just four states in 2008. The requirements created by the NGO necessitate the creation of an evacuation/relocation plan for children in child care, a family-child reunification plan, an evacuation plan for children with special needs and a K-12 multiple disaster plan.

"If you think about children, they're the most vulnerable when disaster strikes, and 69 million children are separated every day from their parents when parents head to work or children to school," said Rich Bland, Save the Children's national director of policy and advocacy. "We decided to start there with our work."

The report judges states based on four tenets, distilled from guidelines created by a post-Hurricane Katrina governmental committee, the now-defunct National Commission on Children and Disasters. It looks at states' evacuation and relocation plans, family-child reunification plans, children with special needs plans and K-12 multiple disaster plans.

Kansas, South Carolina and Oregon have managed to meet all four criteria for the first time this year, demonstrating continued progress toward the Save the Children's goal of nationwide participation.

Iowa stands as an outlier in the group, having mandated none of the four plans throughout the state.

"We've talked with the Save the Children folks for a few years," said John Benson, spokesman for Iowa's Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. "Their drive, and where you see Iowa fall down on it is that Iowa doesn't have children's plans mandated in legislation. We have more generic language around our plans, and almost all of what they're seeking is children specific. Almost all the issues they raise are addressed in a more generic way."

David Johnston, the lead planner for the Iowa department, said that the state's goal was to address all elements of disaster preparedness in a single response plan.

While many states do mandate certain, child-specific elements of disaster planning, Johnston stated that Iowa's state government works directly with schools and other child-care facilities to help them develop their own plans, ultimately requiring institutions like day-cares to meet a certain standard of planning before their accreditation.

"While we don't have the legislation to mandate it, it doesn't mean we don't have these plans in place even down to the local level," Benson added.

By the end of 2016, all states will have to meet the organization's requirements in order to get a major chunk of child care development funding from the federal government, Bland says.

"We got an amendment passed by the House and the Senate that now requires states to meet our standards in order to receive their child care funding block grant from the government," he added. "The whole purpose of this year's research is that we're hoping to close out this basic child care portion of the report card by next year."