One in five children in North Texas lives in poverty, with more than 260,000 kids in the area considered food insecure, according to a biennial study released Tuesday from Children’s Health and the University of Texas at Dallas.

A 97-page report — "Beyond ABC" — offered a comprehensive look at the well-being of children in Dallas County and its five northern neighbors: Collin, Cooke, Denton, Grayson and Fannin counties.

"The challenges aren't going away,"said Timothy Bray, the director of the Institute of Urban Policy Research at UT-Dallas, and one of the authors of the report.

Focused on four indicators — health, economic security, safety and education — the findings were sobering. Included in the report:

The rates of uninsured children in Dallas, Cooke, Fannin and Grayson counties were double the national average.

Texas ranks last in per-capita funding for mental illness.

For single parents earning a poverty wage, early child-care costs could account for nearly half their income.

In Fannin County, CPS caseloads were more than double the state average, with 50.3 cases per caseworker in 2016.

North Texas has less than half as many approved foster homes (1,244) as children needing placement.

There were almost 7,500 confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect in North Texas last year.

More than half of third-grade students in the six counties, nearly 30,000, were reading below grade level.

If communities, non-profit groups and legislators are going to chip away at the challenges, a long-term view with a coordinated and deliberate approach from all parties is needed, said Brent Christopher, the president of the Children’s Medical Center Foundation. Christopher was one of four panelists who spoke on issues highlighted in the report during a symposium Tuesday at the Communities Foundation of Texas.

“We’re talking about issues that are absolutely massive, far larger than any one of our individual organizations can tackle,” he said.

Communities can’t focus on a single issue and expect change, said panelist Michelle Kinder, the executive director of social-and-emotional learning leader the Momentous Institute.

“In your own home, you don’t think of your child as bifurcated in that way,” Kinder said. “You think of ‘what does my child need to succeed?’ The mental health, health, safety, education — all of that is intertwined and intuitive. I think what happens is people get fearful around really complex, large systems. And they want to go into the arena with [one] thing — almost like ‘I can only focus on one thing, don’t talk to me about something else.’ It’s not a fair fight between a very complex problem and a very simplistic view on how to fix it. It’s never going to work.”

A key reason for compiling the data is to arm people with information to take into a “fact-free environment” and lobby for change, said Matt Moore, Children’s Health vice president for government and community relations. An advisory board of community leaders established a final list of indicators to be included, and Bray’s research staff gathered the most recent and relevant data from the six counties.

Political discord that “sucked up all the oxygen” in Austin and Washington, D.C., has made policy making on these issues difficult, Moore said.

“It was really difficult to talk about real problems, real issues that need policy solutions like health care, like education,” he said. “And a book like ‘Beyond ABC,’ a resource that has facts and figures within it, we can cut through some of that cacophony ... to get the elected folks to actually address things.”

Also included in report were two policy recommendations from the advisory board to address each area of focus, ranging from stabilizing federal funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to using housing vouchers to increase the number of mixed-income neighborhoods.

Panelist Mike Koprowski, founder and executive director of Opportunity Dallas, talked at length about using vouchers and other housing policies to redress Dallas’ socioeconomic and racial segregation.

Half of the city contains almost all of the poor children in Dallas, he said, thanks to intentional housing policies.

“When the wealthy live with the wealthy, and the poor live with the poor, it’s going to be a disaster for a city,” Koprowski said.