❮ Projects page First Up

Spatial Analysis Project:

Analyze the availability of all high quality early childhood services in Philadelphia, including: child care programs at the STAR 3 and 4 level; Head Start programs under the auspices of private contractors as well as the School District of Philadelphia; and public and private PreK settings. This information would be correlated to demographic information that indicates childhood risk factors associated with poor academic and social/emotional performance. This information will be analyzed to assess the relationship between neighborhood need and neighborhood capacity. Our goal would be a map that not only provides a visual representation of the relationship between family income and quality of child care programs, but identifies areas of need for high quality early childhood programs and oversaturation at the neighborhood level. This project is especially timely because the School District of Philadelphia has just begun a process of transferring students currently enrolled in their Head Start classrooms to communitybased partners. This move offers a short window and an important opportunity to expand the overall high-quality pre-k capacity, and to more accurately target underserved areas with an abundance of at-risk preschoolers.

Data available:

• Child care program addresses, sorted by zip code and legislative district, quality level and capacity
• Population data by county, including household income by age and demographic break outs
• Legislative district boundaries;
• Location of Head Start and other early childhood classrooms currently managed by the School District of Philadelphia and its private partners;
• List of risk factors associated with poor school performance, including birth weight, mother’s level of education, household income, community violence, etc.

Maps and Reports that will be created:

The maps and accompanying report will correlate the population of children birth to five in Philadelphia with risk factors at the community level, and the availability of high quality early childhood education programs. They will quantitatively demonstrate the areas of the city that are well-served by high quality early learning services and where there is need, particularly for children who are at risk of school failure. Starting with one overall map of Philadelphia, we anticipate having the option of breaking it down into census tracts, zip codes or neighborhoods, depending on the needs of a variety of policy-makers.

How the maps and reports will be used:

These maps and reports will be used with officials at the School District of Philadelphia and at the Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning, both to help them understand the spatial relationship between need and capacity in Philadelphia, and to inform policy decisions about neighborhoods in the city where resources need to be targeted to provide the maximum number of at-risk children with high quality early learning programs.