Good morning readers,
Our office receives a lot of calls from folks with questions about DCF statistics. I usually point them to the Trend Reports, kept by the Center for Child Welfare. The Trend Reports are amazing repositories of big-picture and local-level details. The people who maintain them do a fantastic job. The Trend Reports’ only limitation is that they are designed to be general and can take time to navigate and configure to reach the specific answers you’re looking for.
I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to re-visualize the Trends Report data in a way that answers the most common questions people have about the child welfare system: how many kids are in it?, are removals going up?, is the system growing or shrinking?, is there a foster home crisis?, how many kids are reunified?, and does the child welfare system target children of color?
I am happy (and somewhat nervous) to present the first draft of the results: the Child Welfare System Dashboard – BETA. We are working on finding the Dashboard a permanent home, but for now it is available on tableau.com. I ask you to please support the project by helping test it and giving your feedback (at rlatham@law.miami.edu) if you find errors, have suggestions, or want to see specific questions answered based on the data.
Thank you!
Leave a Reply