Data Integration and Alignment Efforts

Overview of Early Childhood Data Integration in Vermont

Vision

Vermont’s vision is to use high-quality, up-to-date data to inform policy and programmatic decisions to improve equitable access to and quality of services, resources, and supports for young children, their families, and the early childhood system. This will increase our ability to: 

• Obtain a full picture of Vermont’s early childhood landscape and understand the relationship between individual service utilization/access to programs, and cross-sector and longitudinal outcomes
  • Gaps in service provision: access and supply across communities
  • Relationships among characteristics and outcomes
• Connect data and examine long-term outcomes for children across multiple agencies, departments, divisions, and partners to support state leaders in determining child, staff, and program needs for both real-time and longer-term planning
  • Tracking progress of cohorts and individuals over time
• Consistently access data on how many children are being served across sectors, where there are gaps in equitable access, how services are impacting children and under what conditions
  • Availability, utilization, and quality of services available
  • What combinations of programs do children receive and how are they related to outcomes?
• Use centralized data alongside qualitative data and best practice to best allocate limited resources and meet the needs of children and families
  • Understanding of how to organize early childhood systems and supports to achieve outcomes

Goals and Strategies

Vermont has strong systems for monitoring the early childhood system and linking data.

• Increasing the capacity of agencies and Building Bright Futures to prioritize data linking and integration efforts
• Convening and orienting the Data and Evaluation Committee, agency leaders, and data stewards to the vision and reviewing/documenting past efforts, the current status, and opportunities for linking and integrating early childhood data
• Continue building and using the Data Development Agenda to identify Vermont’s key questions, priorities, and gaps in data across early childhood sectors
• Developing new processes for larger-scale systems monitoring, including:
  • Developing common language and definitions 
  • Improving each step of the data cycle including collection, analysis/compilation, and reporting
  • Improving data quality 
• Supporting data literacy statewide to improve data collection and use
• Coordinating and aligning past, current, and new data, monitoring, and evaluation efforts
• Restarting Data Governance Council: Linking data about children’s early childhood experiences across multiple agencies, departments, divisions, and partners to develop an unduplicated count and support state leaders in determining child, staff, and program needs for both real-time and longer-term planning
  • Building out the early childhood data inventory 
  • Initiating new (universal) data sharing agreements/MOUs and protocols
  • Reviewing and revising protocols to support data governance, protect privacy, and guide data integration, access, and use
  • Developing shared definitions
  • Designing and implementing new protocols for data storage and data use cases
  • Reviewing and revising protocols for master data management and unique IDs
  • Develop a data lake to support data linking/integration and determine which entity will host/support centralizing data

Data is centralized, meaningful, publicly available, and accessible through Vermont’s Early Childhood Data & Policy Center.

• Vermont’s Early Childhood Data & Policy Center is the mechanism to support data analysis, and dissemination of data (producing and making data accessible)
• Convening data stewards to determine data availability, cadence/frequency of data sharing, and assessing capacity, as well as to provide technical assistance
• Ensuring the Center has the direct ability to pull data from the Data Lake through APIs
• Developing continuous protocols for sharing, reviewing, validating, and uploading data
• Producing an unduplicated count 
• Continue to build and refine the Early Childhood Data Portal and Vermont’s Early Childhood Data & Policy Center as a nonpartisan, independent source of data, research, publications, and important information for policymakers, stakeholders, and the public on issues and priorities for children ages birth through age 8 in Vermont.
• Partnership between agencies and BBF to develop data briefs, fact sheets, non-technical summaries, The State of Vermont’s Children, and other publications alongside the data portal to disseminate information

Vermont policymakers, the Administration, practitioners, and partners consistently use data to inform decisions because they have the ability to track early childhood outcomes and services, measure the return on investments, inform program planning and policies, and drive continuous quality improvement.

• Consistently access data on how many children are being served across sectors, where there are gaps in equitable access, how services are impacting children and under what conditions
• Examine long-term outcomes for children who participated in various early childhood programs and improve the quality of programs through the use of data to inform decision-making.
• Use centralized data alongside qualitative data and best practice to best allocate limited resources and meet the needs of children and families through data-driven decision-making.

Background

Vermont’s vision is to use high-quality, up-to-date data to inform policy and programmatic decisions to improve equitable access to and quality of services, resources, and supports for young children, their families, and the early childhood system. However, there are significant challenges to achieving this vision, including: 

• Lack of access to basic early childhood data
• Limited ability to examine inequities
• Data and technological infrastructure 
• Lack of alignment in definitions and reporting periods limits comparisons
• Collecting data
• Disruptions in data collection due to COVID-19 and measurement changes

Preschool Development Grant Activity

Vermont is leveraging the Vermont Integration Project: Building Integration in Vermont’s Birth-5 Early Childhood Systems (VIP B-5), to build BBF and Vermont state agency capacity to prioritize data integration and alignment efforts. The following agencies, departments, and divisions supporting children and families have added staff capacity to address these critical data gaps and evaluate VIP B-5: The Agency of Education, The Agency of Human Services: Department for Children and Families Child Development Division, Department of Health, Department of Mental Health, and The Agency of Administration: Office of Racial Equity. Led by BBF, these efforts will strengthen Vermont’s ability to:

1. Collect, analyze, share, and use data, using a continuous quality improvement lens to monitor data practices 
2. Participate in VECAP Data and Evaluation Committee meetings related to data governance, priorities, gaps, and opportunities
3. Develop strategies to link data across sectors and data collection repositories
4. Support the evaluation of VIP B-5 activities
5. Make data meaningful and publicly available

This work will support Vermont’s ability to examine the system of services with an equity lens, understand short- and long-term child and family outcomes, and ensure early childhood stakeholders have access to up-to-date data to guide best practices and decision-making. Data stewards will partner with Building Bright Futures to ensure high-quality data is continuously disseminated and publicly available through Vermont’s Early Childhood Data & Policy Center.

This work will involve:

• Convening/stakeholder engagement to define metrics and agreed-upon indicators 
  • Meetings with data stewards to determine data availability, cadence/frequency of data sharing, and assessing capacity, as well as to provide technical assistance
  • Convening Data & Evaluation Committee to work on Data Development Agenda workshop series
  • Monthly (or quarterly) meetings with key stakeholders and data stewards
  • Initial stakeholder feedback sessions for Act 76
  • Completing annual documentation of Data Development Agenda
• Aligning the multiple monitoring and evaluation initiatives 
  • Scheduling consistent team review of monitoring and evaluation projects
  • Developing internal mechanisms for tracking
  • Completing initial drafts for crosswalks
• Developing new processes for larger-scale systems monitoring
  • Developing internal tracking mechanisms
  • Initiating new data sharing agreements/MOUs and protocols for data sharing 
  • Restarting the Data Governance Council
• Making data publicly available