Using State & County-Level Indicators for Needs Assessment: The Kids Count Data Book
Listen to the Common Good Data Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
Organizations find themselves asking similar questions when it comes to conducting a needs assessment: Where can I find reliable data? How do I know if it’s relevant to my community? Is the information up to date?
These are important concerns. Accessing meaningful data can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re trying to make it applicable to the specific work you’re doing.
Today, we address these questions by giving you an overview of one key data source: the Kids Count Data Book, which provides state and county-level indicators on child and family well-being.
This resource is particularly valuable for organizations focusing on children, youth, and human services. We’ll walk through how this data can inform needs assessments and decision-making for programs and policies.
And stay tuned—this is just the start. Upcoming conversations will highlight additional data sources to support our assessments and the impact of our work.
You’ll hear:
(01:56) What the Kids Count Data Book is and why it’s relevant for nonprofits focusing on child and family services.
(03:52) What key trends and indicators in child well-being are highlighted in the 2024 Kids Count Report.
(12:19) How to navigate the website and access the data at both the state and county levels.
(17:30) What an example of using this data effectively at the state level looks like, featuring the Georgia Family Connection Partnership.
Resources Mentioned
-
Drew Reynolds: Welcome everyone to the Common Good Data Podcast. My name is Drew Reynolds. Today, we're going to continue our conversation on secondary data collection for the purposes of needs assessments. And you might recall two weeks ago on this podcast, we talked about the importance of needs assessments and why nonprofit and social sector organizations are often using needs assessments in their work.
And I'd emphasize that they're so important because they help you to know your community better. They help you plan programs and interventions and strategies to bring about community change. And it also really is helpful in The Sustaining Your Work Financially, because it helps you do a better job in terms of demonstrating your, the work and your impact and what you're capable of doing in grant writing.
And so I really emphasize the importance of needs assessment as a regular practice that organizations are doing to be able to show that they really know their communities well, and they know how to serve them and how to really be in tune with the challenges and [00:01:00] problems that their non profit or social sector organization is set out to face.
I get questions from clients all the time about needs assessment that ask questions like, where can I get data and how can I make use of it? And is it relevant to where I live? Is it up to date? And those questions can be really challenging because it's not always super intuitive or easy to access data on your community in a way that's meaningful for the work that you're trying to do.
And so I'm trying to do today, or what I'm trying to do is to help give you a taste of some of the sources that I. Use when I'm trying to develop needs assessments when I'm working with some of the clients that I work with. And we're going to do a whole series on this with a couple more episodes coming up in the future that are going to look at different sources of secondary data that organizations who focus on children and youth in particular, but anywhere in the health of health, mental health human services organizations that they may be able to find useful.
So for today, we are going to focus on a set of data called the Kids Count Data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which is really a [00:02:00] true national standard when it comes to collecting data and information being of children and youth. So to start though, I actually want to begin with just an overview of their 2024 report, which shows a summary of some of the key trends and key indicators that they're looking at when they're looking at child well being.
And the data that are comprised the KidsCount data source are all from federal sources typically. Though there are a few others in there. You can read the methodology on their website. But what I like about the KidsCount data source is that It's easy to understand and to follow and to find and it compiles data from a bunch of different federal sources that are not otherwise put together in a meaningful way for community members to use.
And so that's why it's so incredibly valuable. What's also great is that because it's federal data, you can count on it being very reliable. So the data that are collected in Georgia versus Wyoming and New Jersey, it's all collected typically around the same way. So you can then make comparisons across states and jurisdictions to really [00:03:00] understand what Where one geographical area may stand up against another.
They do state rankings and things like that too, which we'll talk about in just a few minutes. So what we'll talk about today is a little bit of what the Kids Count data is, that summary of some trends in the 2024 report. And then we'll also walk through on the website, how to add data.
access that data at a state and county level. And then I'm also going to, at the very end, show a nice example of how that might, data can be used at a state level. There's an organization called the Georgia Family Connection Partnership, which uses KidsCount data to make a very useful online tool and guide for those who are working in the state of Georgia, which is where I reside.
So I'll give you some examples of how you can use KidsCount data in a couple of different ways. First, let's talk about the data book. In 2024, the NAKC Foundation released their 2024 data book. And they have indicators that look at things in the economic realm, education realm, health, and family and community.
And they have some kind of key indicators. I think there's 16 of them total. [00:04:00] And they track those over time to see, how are children and families doing over time. And as you can imagine things at this time because it was released in 2024, but the data when it comes to children and youth typically lags a year or two.
So most of the data in this report are from the 2022 calendar year or sometimes the 2021 2022 school year if you're looking at education data, right? So what did they find? In the 24 data book the findings were that on the economic realm in child poverty, 16 percent of children in the United States are living in poverty, and that's down a percentage point from 17%.
In 2019, I think that's a meaningful indicator too. I think a lot of people have looked at some of the federal interventions that were done during the pandemic. Expansion of the child tax credit, for example, being one of them as potentially correlated with that drop in child poverty, but in any case, what that's the number that you're.
We more or less are sitting at across the country. And that number has changed a little bit [00:05:00] over time, but actually not that much. If you look historically going back since the sixties, really. It's a good indicator to get a look on historically, just to get a sense of what child poverty has looked like over time.
Now, of course, this is true, not just for economic, but all the other indicators. We do see big disparities, particularly around the areas of race and ethnicity. When we look at, for example, Black children across the country, that number of those living in child poverty jumps to 30%. So it's always important to be keeping in mind some of those disparities that we see across race and ethnicity.
In the education realm, this is where we actually saw some of the biggest movement, and as you can imagine, it's likely due to the pandemic. In 2022, only 32 percent of 4th graders were proficient in reading. That's down from 34%, which was one of the higher areas that we had been historically on that indicator before the pandemic in 2019.
Only 32 percent of 4th graders were proficient in reading. And as I alluded to previously, we do see some disparities there on race and ethnicity. It's goes down to 20 [00:06:00] percent are proficient for those who are Latino children and down to 16 percent for black children.
So you do see a huge difference there in fourth grade reading proficiency. And then eighth graders, it was the same thing. It was at 33 percent in 2019 before the pandemic were of eighth graders were proficient in math. And that's down to 26 percent now being proficient in math. So we're seeing this big drop of about anywhere between four or five or six percentage points nationally on proficiency in some of these indicators.
And, depending on what math or sorry, what What education statistics you're looking at, what we're seeing is a 5 percent drop, 5, 10 percent somewhere in there on academic indicators. And the question I think now, for us who are interested in the well being of children and youth, is to see if we can get those education numbers back up to where they were before.
Pre pandemic. Interestingly too, we see a huge change in chronic absenteeism. So 30%, almost one in three children and students in 2022 were chronically absent, which is defined as missing 10 percent of the school [00:07:00] days in a given school year. That's a pretty high number. It was down to 16 percent before.
So that's a huge change. Now I do think now in 2024 with the pandemic largely in the rear view mirror, we're going to see some of those numbers come down. I think a number of school districts have already reported that to be the case, but I think that's something to be mindful of is the importance of student attendance.
And I do believe depending, it's going to depend on your jurisdiction and where you live, but looking at where those numbers are now versus where they were during the pandemic and then pre pandemic It's going to be important to determine where your community currently stands with respect to student attendance in schools.
Looking at health, we see that there is an increase in children born with low birth weight from 2019 to 2022, from down, or sorry, up to 8. 6 percent from 8. 3. That indicator is also used as like a benchmark for Overall health of the health system is looking at low birth weight indicators.
And so that's trending in the wrong direction that we like to see when it [00:08:00] comes to the well being of children. We are also seeing an increase in child and teen deaths. up to 30 per 100, 000 from 25 per 100, 000 just three years prior. And the research is showing this is being increasingly driven by deaths from firearms.
So that's a newer phenomenon, in, in current experiences of understanding children's health, and as an indicator that people are paying more and more attention to. One of the good indicators that we saw around health is that there seem to be fewer children living in households without health insurance, down to 5 percent from 6%.
But again, we see some disparity there, 8 percent for Latino children and 11 percent for American Indian or Alaskan Native children as well. And so there is a little bit of disparity on the health insurance indicators. So with health, we're seeing helps some good news in terms of insurance, but more challenging news when it looks at things like birth weight and deaths per 100, 000 indicator as well.
So you have a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to the health [00:09:00] indicators. Looking at the family and community indicators, one, we did see a lower percentage of children living in higher poverty areas. Or high poverty areas, and then also lower teen birth rates per a hundred thousand. So that was some encouraging news in the family and community indicators.
So anyways, that's an overall review of some statistics that we use to benchmark the state of children and children wellbeing in the United States. Now, they take this information in the Kids Count data book and then rank the states accordingly based on where these different indicators come in.
Which can be useful a little bit, maybe it tells a bit of a story. I think that the overall state rankings for most people who are doing work at a local level are not that important because so much of this changes at the local level. But it's important just to have that context in place.
Sometimes it can be helpful if you're trying to make a case For why people should invest in your state if your state is not doing as well. Or if you're trying to look at, what are the sort of back practices that states that are higher on this on this ranking can sometimes be an [00:10:00] argument for investing in a particular policy or program.
So the states with the best overall outcome for children and youth tended to be in New England and the upper Midwest. Those who tended to fare the best. It includes the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Utah as the one, two, three in those rankings, whereas those who fared worse tended to be in the Southeast, out in the West, your sunbelt states more or less.
And that included Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico routing out those who fared off the worst. Now for those who listened to this podcast, we have a lot of folks from Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. So I figured I'd share those as well. Georgia ranked 37th among states in terms of child wellbeing, North Carolina was 33rd, and then South Carolina 40th.
And so we do see that some of those southeastern states are in that below the average of 25, when it comes to the the rankings for the states. Okay, so that's an overview of the 2024 report. General understandings of What those indicators are for child well being and then also a bit of a discussion about where some [00:11:00] of the states rank as of the 2024 data.
Now the next step for us today is to talk a little bit about how you might access that data, where can you get it and how you might be able to use it. And so we are going to walk through What that might look like to access the Kids Count Data Center information. I'm sure you can Google it.
It'll probably be one of the first results you find, but if you'd like to enter in the URL, it's datacenter. aecf. org, and I will show you what that looks like.
All right. Once you navigate to this URL, you'll see that we have the Kids Count Data Center up here in the top, and you can select a state or territory to begin your search or look at just U. S. national data. If you scroll down to the map, you can actually just Toggle over your state and find it.
I'm going to choose Georgia because that's where I live. And when you click on the state, you'll see that the indicators start to come in for your state. On the left hand side, you can also narrow that down by county, school district, or city, some congressional districts as well [00:12:00] are included in there.
You can filter them by demographics information or other types of topics and different types of characteristics as well. So let's take a look at, for example Indicators that look at education. And so you can see here, if I click on education, we've got early childhood indicators, we have school age indicators and others.
And a lot of these data, if you click on one of the indicators, here's one for school age of children absent more than 15 days from school. We talked about that chronic absenteeism rate previously that we looked at before, right? And you can see how it shows the state level indicators.
And then it also shows it in the context of time, which can be really helpful. So you see that what was that indicator looking at and what percentage of students were absent more than 15 days of school in Georgia in 2013, and how that number has changed over the course of the last decade or so. And you can see right here, and from 2020, 8%, all the way up to 2022, 24.
4 percent across the state of Georgia. [00:13:00] So that's a nice little example where you can find some of those data let's take a look at another indicator. Maybe we can go up to demographics. Sometimes that's very helpful just to have a sense of the who lives in your state. And we can go child population by race and ethnicity and age group.
And you can see here you have your location, race, ethnicity, and then also the age group. And can show a little bit of what a population looks like. What's nice about the age group is that you can. It's always helpful when you're writing your needs assessments to be as focused as you can, because if you're an organization that serves children you're likely serving a particular segment of children.
Maybe you're birth to eight and you're doing early childhood work. Maybe you're focused on elementary, middle school students, or maybe it's high school and into college. You're able to then provide data that's unique to that age group or that particular developmental level, which I think can be really compelling when you're putting together your, your needs assessments.
And again, the more specific you can be, the more understand, the more you [00:14:00] can demonstrate a close understanding of the population that you're serving. That's a good example there. You can also look at these at a county level. So if I click on by county for example, and I'll take off my other filters I've applied here,
and if I click on county here I can look at things that are at the county level. So maybe I'll scroll down here to click on children living in poverty, and I have that right here in a table sorted by county. So you can scroll down to a county that I live in. I live here in DeKalb County. Right here, and you can see over time how that number has changed.
It's dropped from 30 percent back about 10 years ago down to closer to less than about 19 percent now. So you've seen a big drop in child poverty across the county. So it can be helpful too to see some of those changes over time. It helps tell a story a little bit. About the nature of your accounting, the work that's being done in your county and [00:15:00] helping to understand the trends where they're going up or down and where your organization fits within that broader narrative.
But having it at the County level can be so important because then again, you're getting more and more specific. I think a lot of times when you're writing a grant, if you live in a state, especially in a state like California, for example, it's not really all that meaningful to talk about data across the state because there's such a difference and it's just a large state, right?
Even the case in Georgia, right? It depends on where you're living, but some of these kind of state and county indicators might be a little bit large for the jurisdiction. What's actually unique about Georgia is that it has, I think, the most counties of any state in the U. S., and so we actually in Georgia have a lot of small counties, whereas other states like Arizona have just a handful of really large counties.
And so these data are a little bit more useful for folks who are living in states like Georgia, where you have a lot of that kind of more localized application of the data. Those are some nice examples [00:16:00] from the data center from NEEKC. I would encourage you to go explore your own state, in your own county, to see what information you might be able to gather from the data source online here, how you might include that in your needs assessments, and how that might be useful when you're writing grants and trying to make the case for people to invest in the programs and services that you're delivering.
I will also give another example here. of a second source that is really useful for those who are living in Georgia.
This is the Georgia Family Connection Partnership, which is a great source for all kinds of things, child and family services oriented across the state. And they have taken the KidsCount data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and created a useful tool on their website that allows you to use that data at the county level in Georgia for all kinds of purposes.
I'll go ahead and clear and click on data tools.
[00:17:00] So I'll start here. And also if you need the URL for this, it's gafcp. org slash kids dash count. But if you look up Georgia Family Connection Partnership, I'm sure you'll find your way there. And then I'm going to click on this button here, data tools. And when I click on data tools, that there's Georgia profiles, birth to 21 snapshots the indicator explorer, interactive map data disaggregated by race and ethnicity comparable counties, all kinds of really useful tools here.
I'm going to click on the interactive maps. I think that one's really a quite a useful tool for just about everyone. And what you can do on the interactive map is select a geography. Say, for example, let's look at the county level. And then look at an indicator. Let's say we look at an indicator like children or students who graduate from high school on time.
Actually, let's do a children absentee absenteeism, because that was one that we're looking at before. What [00:18:00] it'll do is it colors the entire state here by county on those that counties that have higher or lower level of indicators on that particular, the particular indicator. If I zoom in here, We can see here's our, here's the city of Atlanta, where I reside, the CAB county relative compared to Fulton, Clayton, and some of the others around.
You have this nice shading that kind of gives a sense of what the county is looking like on that particular indicator. And then on some other indicators too, let's take a look at Let's see here, children without health insurance for example. Here's another one that gives a nice example of how that data changes as you can see depending on the indicator across the state.
Now what I also really like is the fact that you can go to the census track level and that's actually something that is on the KidsCount website. I think you might be able to download it in the raw data files, but on the, I was not able to access it from the website to be able to get down to the census tract level, which this is where it becomes really important, especially for those living in [00:19:00] urban areas where there's, there can be huge differences between one census tract and the other right next door.
And say, I'll click on zoom to County. Let's do the cab here. Yeah, I guess we're zoomed in here. And let's take a look at an indicator. Let's look at children living in poverty. So here's a map of the city of Atlanta. Here's DeKalb County, Fulton County over here to the left. You can get down here to the census track level that shows you differences by census track.
And a lot of times if you're doing work in a localized area, that says, hey, we serve this particular community inside this county. Going down to the census tract is going to be critical to be able to get that granular. And you can see that, if you're serving, let's say you're doing some work and you're serving up here in the Beaufort Highway area.
Up near Chambly. For those of you who are not here and not necessarily from the land, you won't necessarily know all these geographies, but this particular area is known for being an area where there's lots of folks from really all over the [00:20:00] world represented. And so you see here that we do have higher levels of poverty as high as 60, 50 percent childhood poverty.
And some of these areas but then just a few tracks over, it drops to much, much lower, right? And so that's what we see. That's why that census track can be so helpful because this, it gives you that granularity and detail between these localized geographies that tell a more nuanced story than what you'll find at the state.
And national levels, right? Or even county levels for that matter. So I encourage you to check out the Georgia Family Connection Partnership data sources. There's other data tools that you can use here. I think the interactive map is really helpful when you're trying to get down to the census tract level.
But when you look at Georgia profiles, for example, you can select a county profile. Let's go ahead and select the CAB since we've been doing lots of examples there. And it's really helpful because it gives you just like a print off PDF. Imagine you're a nonprofit leader and you want to be able to just have something you can print off and share with your board members really quickly.
It's nice to have something that you can just click print. And it's all put together to [00:21:00] you to give people who need to have at least a little bit of a sense of what's going on in the lives of children and families. These accounting profiles can be extraordinarily helpful.
Anyways, I hope today it's been useful that you've got a chance to review and see a little bit of what the any Casey's KidsCount data can do for you and for your organization, how you'll be able to access some of those key child and family indicators that are so critical for doing strong needs assessments, but being able to communicate meaningfully about the lives of children and youth, and in turn, develop strategies and interventions and plans to improve wellbeing.
So I hope this is helpful for you and look forward to seeing you on the next podcast.
