National Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Day celebrates the use of GIS, a powerful software tool used to create and display maps that help geographically illustrate and communicate complex problems. GIS maps can help identify assets and resources, as well as understand underlying location-based trends in datasets.
Child Care Aware® of America (CCAoA) uses GIS to help examine and better understand the federal, state, or local needs of child care systems. Mapping allows us to bridge our research to advocacy efforts, strategize with partners about resource allocation in their networks, and effectively use publicly available data to gain a more complete picture of the communities we serve. CCAoA uses GIS to create interactive, customized state dashboards and narrative story maps to study the supply of and access to child care programs, emergency preparedness and response, participation in the Child and Adult Care Food Programs (CACFP), and socioeconomic demographics of populations of children and parents.
CCAoA is celebrating National GIS Day by amplifying our state policy dashboard, a unique and innovative tool to track and examine states’ child care and early childhood education (ECE) policies and investments across the nation from 2020 to the present. While GIS products are often highly quantitative, our state policy dashboard shows how mapping technologies are suitable for other types of more qualitative data visualizations as well.
In January 2024, Child Care Aware of America launched this comprehensive, interactive dashboard with the goal of ensuring that advocates have the information they need to build more accessible child care in their states, become and stay informed about what other states are doing, and consider what is possible regarding child care solutions.
States have considerable flexibility in how they use federal child care funding, meaning child care policies and additional state investments (if any) vary greatly across states. With the availability of federal COVID-19 relief dollars, states had an opportunity to make improvements to their child care systems to expand eligibility, improve affordability, and increase supply. States have now completely spent down federal relief funding for child care, but some are investing state funds to continue the policies initially seeded with federal relief. Unfortunately, not all states are making the same level of investments, leaving an uneven patchwork of state child care policies and resources across the United States. Mapping the efforts of states to invest and improve their child care systems is critical to determining which policy approaches are effective to building a more equitable, accessible and affordable child care system long-term, and where states could be making additional investments.
The state policy dashboard is easy to use. Each state has a profile that describes how federal relief funding was used, along with significant state legislation enacted between 2020-through the present. Users can find this information by simply clicking on the state, and a profile box will appear. Depending on the type of policies that states have implemented, more specific information is available within the profiles to offer a fuller picture of the levels and types of investments made.
Users can also filter state policy information by specific categories, found on the left side of the dashboard. When selecting a filter, the applicable states will appear shaded in dark blue. Users can then click on a state and scroll through their profile to find the relevant information related to the filter selection. We suggest applying one filter at a time, as the filters “stack” upon one another, which further narrows the information to apply to all selected filters. A counter on the bottom right will show how many states are enacting a certain policy, depending on the criteria selected.
Users can filter the state information by the following categories:
From applying the filters in the state policy dashboard, we find that:
While the dashboard is updated weekly, it’s important to note that there are some limitations to collecting the information. While we strive to update each state’s profile regularly, it is not meant to be exhaustive of all state policy changes and it’s possible we miss an update.
State and national partners are key to providing information for this dashboard. We appreciate hearing from you about any additional state updates we can include in the dashboard. Reach out with updates to diane.girouard@usa.childcareaware.org.