Maybe Pensacola isn’t such a great place to raise a child.

For me it was.

I suspect most of my neighbors also found it a great place to raise their kids.

But it’s impossible to ignore that it’s not such a great place for a third of the people who call Pensacola and Escambia County home.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since the Studer Community Institute updated its Pensacola Metro Dashboard.

For the metro, which includes Santa Rosa and Escambia counties, the numbers look good. The bright spots include:

— Booming bed tax collections, fueled by a growing tourism industry.

— An increase in the number of middle class households.

— A rising population.

But when you drill down into the Escambia numbers, the dashboard tells a different story.

— Only 66 percent of children show up in an Escambia County public school ready for kindergarten.

— Only 66 percent of Escambia youth graduate from high school on time.

Another way to put it:

A third of our children aren’t ready for kindergarten and a third of our children aren’t graduating from high school on time.

The correlation between kindergarten readiness and high school graduation is impossible to ignore. If children start school with a vocabulary that’s two and three years behind their age group, it’s a struggle for them to ever catch up.

“For the school system, I’ve always said that the number one problem with education is that too many kids are coming to kindergarten unprepared,” said Malcolm Thomas, Escambia County School District superintendent.

“We’ve seen the research that talks about the millions of words that children coming out of poverty are deficient in. When they start school, their language is delayed. They haven’t been exposed to conversations and words, so they can’t connect meaning when they get into a school environment, which is rich with vocabulary and words. That’s the language deficit that holds them back.”

But it’s not the only thing holding them back. Poverty plays an even bigger role. Consider this: 64 percent of children qualify for a free or reduced-price meal plan in Escambia public schools.

Think about it … 64 percent of the parents with a child in an Escambia County public school need financial help to afford a school lunch.

What’s even more alarming is that the majority of students in Escambia County are on the free-meal plan.

For a family of four to qualify for the free meal plan, their annual household income can’t exceed $24,000.

“Imagine a family of four living on a combined gross income of $24,000 a year or less,” said Thomas. “If that is your combined income in the house, you probably don’t have a car. You’re lucky if you have a house, and if you do, you’re probably not the only family living in it. Buying food for your family of four is a struggle. You can just barely make it all work.”

The Institute’s dashboard shows that Escambia and Santa Rosa counties have a multitude of problems, ranging from a low labor-force participation rate to child-care costs that consume 43 percent of a household’s monthly income.

But the thing that truly holds us back is poverty. If we hope to truly improve the quality of life in the Pensacola area, we must find ways to alleviate poverty in Escambia County.

A recent study by two Harvard professors reinforces this. Called “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergeneration Mobility,” the study found that it’s nearly impossible for Escambia County children who grow up in low-income families to escape poverty.

“It’s among the worst counties in the U.S. in helping poor children up the income ladder,” said the report.

In terms of economic opportunities, we are at the very bottom.

About 98 percent of the 2,478 counties in the U.S. provide better economic opportunities for its poor children than we do in Escambia.

This poverty issue is an anchor that weighs upon our community’s health-care system, economic development and particularly our public schools.

“But it’s not just about education,” said Thomas. “You can use the analogy of the one-legged stool. It isn’t going to support anyone or anything. So if we just focus on education, we won’t really fix anything. We are going to have to look at education; we are going to have to look at access to health care; and we are going to have to look at economic development. This is the only way people who are in poverty will ever get a leg up.”

He’s right.

Over the next several months, the Studer Community Institute will take a deeper look into these very issues and produce a series of in-depth reports. Staff at the Institute, as well as the University of West Florida, will explore what’s driving the numbers in the Pensacola Metro Dashboard as well as the work people are doing to address the multitude of problems that the dashboard highlights.

The good news is that the metropolitan area showed year-over-year improvements in 13 of 16 metrics in the dashboard. But in too many cases we still don't meet state and national benchmarks. While our per capita income in the metro is up, we still trail the state average by $4,500. And while Escambia County’s graduation rate has improved by 10 percentage points since 2009, we still lag that state average by 10 points.

As Sydney Allen, a senior at Washington High School, and Isabella Nickinson, a kindergartner at Cordova Park Elementary School, say in their video, we can do better.

Isabella is part of the 66 percent who showed up ready for kindergarten, and Sydney is part of 66 percent who will graduate from high school.

But if we’re going to be serious about Pensacola being a great place to raise a family, then we can’t have a community that allows one of three children to fall through the cracks.