Connecting across PK to K: Steps toward an Early Childhood IDS in Miami-Dade County

• In Event: 3-201 - Using Integrated Data Systems to Foster Collaboration and Innovation in Early Childhood Policy

Integrative Statement

The Miami-Dade County Partnership for School Readiness and Early School Success was created in 2014 and is a county-wide/university partnership among early childhood care and education agencies, early intervention services, and the public school system. Developed through a researcher-practitioner collaboration, public early learning programs and the school system came together with the shared partnership goal to better understand the early childhood experiences of children prior to the transition to kindergarten. The ultimate vision was to create a ECE IDS that linked data horizontally across early childhood programs to better understand the needs of children, families, and communities served, and to link data vertically on early childhood program participation across the transition to the K-12 public school system. Through the development of formal mechanisms for data sharing and procedures for the use of these data to inform research, practice, and policy, partners shared the common goal to identify where community resources should be targeted to reduce school readiness gaps at kindergarten entry.

Through collaboration with the Center for Computational Sciences, several sets of administrative records have been linked for two entire cohorts of children entering public kindergarten during 2013-14 and 2014-15. A formal data sharing agreement has been established, as well as a governance document, and a steering committee. Currently prekindergarten data that includes children’s program participation, attendance, disability classification, assessment data, child care quality, and community-level indicators has been linked to kindergarten entry, kindergarten readiness assessments, and other kindergarten outcomes. Initial findings about prekindergarten patterns of program participation, equity in access to quality care, and associations with kindergarten readiness will be shared with a Policy Leader group, and where further agenda setting will be generated with respect to priority research questions, and priorities agencies that could be invited to join the ECE IDS (e.g., Department of Children and Families, Department of Health).

In this presentation, we will (1) discuss the process for developing the partnership; (2) initial findings from our demonstration test case; and (3) procedures we are establishing for long-term sustainability of the ECE IDS, future directions, and challenges.

Author

• Rebecca Bulotsky-Shearer, University of Miami
  Presenting Author