The futures of 9.2 million youngsters in the U.S. - one in seven - are at serious risk because of chronic family conditions, a new study says.

To help those youngsters, the Annie E. Casey Foundation will soon launch a Neighborhood Transformation/Family Development initiative based on the premise that children do well when their families live in nurturing neighborhoods.

In the 1999 edition of its Kids Count Data Book, the foundation found that:

• 26 percent of kids with four or more family risk factors were high school dropouts in 1998, compared to 1 percent of kids with none of the risks.
• 16 percent of high-risk females 15 to 19 years old were teenage mothers, compared to one-tenth of 1 percent of those with none of the risks.
• California has the most high-risk kids, 1.5 million, while Wyoming has the fewest, 10,000. The District of Columbia has the largest share of kids in the high-risk category, 39 percent, followed by Louisiana, 22, percent, and Mississippi, 21 percent. Utah has the smallest share, 5 percent.
• Nationally, 25 percent of high-risk kids are in rural areas, 44 percent in central cities and 31 percent in suburbs.
• One-third of identifiable high-risk kids, about 3 million, live in poor central city neighborhoods.
• Nearly 30 percent of all black children and nearly 25 percent of all Hispanic children are in the high-risk category, compared to 6 percent of white children. That means black children are almost five times as likely and Hispanic children are four times as likely as white youngsters to be growing up in families with a high-risk profile.