2022 Community Snapshots are here! [WCA ebulletin #24]

2022 Community Snapshots are here!

On April 20, WCA launched the 2022 edition of our popular Community Snapshots!

This digital publication features data profiles for children and youth under age 25 for Westchester County and all of the 40 geographic school districts with information on each unique mix of demographics, economics, education, health, and family make-up.   The WCA Community Snapshots were first published in 2014 and have evolved and expanded since then. Community Snapshot this year is available to everyone as downloadable documents but there is also a Premium version online that provides interactive visualizations which offer trending data, background, and exact counts for key indicators for our children.

What’s new for 2022

At first glance, aspects of our 2022 Community Snapshots may look familiar, but a deeper dive reveals significant differences and improvements including:

  • More data indicators are broken down by race. WCA is already very much aware that county-level statistics often hide disparities.  Breaking down data by race/ethnicity revealed the hidden disparities in each district and reflects the greater societal awareness of them.
  • New information on internet access and the digital divide. WCA has been advocating for digital equity since the start of the pandemic. The need for this advocacy is demonstrated in varying levels of access to internet broadband among districts in our Snapshots. Soon we will be able to enhance this information with results from our Digital Access Survey which will soon be released.
  • New data on school supports. We illustrated the level of support for public school students in each district by calculating the ratio of total students to different personnel including teachers, psychologists, social workers, and security guards. The most recent data we could access was for 2018, but we will keep our eye on this indicator to see how things change as the pandemic normalizes.
  • Premium online version for 2022 Elite access to an online, interactive dashboard is available this year with the profiles for Westchester County and all 40 districts that provide additional information about data trends, sources, exact counts, and updates. Those who make a minimum donation of $25 will get Premium access to:
    • Bonus years of data for featured indicators
    • Exact totals and counts in addition to published percentages
    • Embedded data sources and definitions.

We sincerely believe that the Premium version of our 2022 Community Snapshots is a much more informative and engaging way of exploring the featured data. It can serve as a meaningful foundation for advocacy and the implementation of much-needed change. Contributions for the Premium version will help us to update data in the Community Snapshots frequently and will support our future work to show the realities of the lives of Westchester’s children through data.

Special thanks to the staff of WCA, including former Program and Policy Manager, Josh Prywes, for their support throughout the entirety of this project.  We are very grateful also to Terence Lake, Sydney Moraitis, and Bruce Segal who volunteered their time and knowledge to the development of this publication. 

Check out our 2022 Community Snapshots available online at
https://wca4kids.org/our-work/interactive-data/communitysnapshots2022_free/.

 

See other articles in WCA eBulletin #24

  • WCA review of the 2023 New York State Budget
  • 2022 Spring Benefit on June 1st – tickets, journal ads, and sponsorship opportunities

 

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