Join us on Thursday, December 9th and 11:00 AM EDT for a virtual workshop-style roundtable discussion with other child-serving organizations in various stages of the collaborative process. Everyone will leave with an understanding of the possibility of a collaborative approach and the steps necessary to be ready to implement it.

Your organization and your schools are serving the same children; wouldn't it be great if you could know how the children are doing in school - grades, behavior, attendance, etc. You could collaborate to understand the value of the programs you're providing, including measured improvements, attendance, etc. You could have real-time data that enables your community to understand the difference your organizations are making.

Assessments | Outcomes | Accountability | Collaboration

Since 2008, the COMET team has been working to support the success of children. 

The COMET® System, a web-based data management tool, was created to solve the problem of data being processed and analyzed too slowly to help children. The goal of COMET is to support our customers' organizations and missions by providing data management to improve programs and youth outcomes. We work with educators, parents, program providers, policymakers, and researchers to support informed decision-making in pursuit of this goal.

COMET Informatics (COMET 4 Children) was developed out of a partnership between two leading experts in their fields: A. Dirk Hightower, Ph.D., Executive Director (former) Children's Institute, a center of excellence in supporting the social and emotional health of children, has been working with communities, schools, and other not-for-profits for over 30 years to support the success of children; and Serge Lossa, Ph.D., CEO SophiTEC, Inc., a software development firm specializing in web-based, database applications. 

COMET was founded as a tool for measuring outcomes.  At its core, features to assess and understand the progress of children in a variety of programs, to identify gaps, and report the gains help our partners provide appropriate and timely interventions.  As the COMET System evolved, the imperative to support service providers and collect attendance resulted in a rich set of capabilities to operate a child-focused organization, including tracking and reporting on membership, programs, classes and activities, counseling and therapeutic services and their associated outcomes.

Our partnerships with such a variety of child-serving organizations brought attention to the silos of information that are created when the organizations serving a child are not also sharing information about that child. This led to the creation of our Collaborative Solutions. COMET Collaborative allows multiple organizations to share data about all of the children in a community. This type of sharing allows communities to come together to serve the needs of a child across all facets of their lives.

The COMET team has experience supporting collaborative community initiatives and community funding organizations by integrating data from program sites, schools, and homes. These efforts are HIPAA and FERPA compliant, using a rigorous data usage consent methodology and our customized to meet the goals of the community initiatives and stakeholders. 

Whether a School-Age Collaborative, focused on bringing together data gathered in schools and Out-of-school time organizations for a full picture of a child’s capabilities, or Whole Child Health, focused on the creating a singular picture of a child from the data collected in the medical systems and by community based organizations to provide better access to services, COMET Collaborative is molded to the organization to create and support an environment of continuous improvement, allowing the community to analyze and leverage comprehensive data revealing emerging trends supporting preventative and corrective action, supporting flexible analysis. Data-driven decision-making, creating an integrated system allowing for process changes that reduce waste and duplicative data-gathering efforts.

COMET Informatics started as a collaboration of two Rochester, NY organizations (Children's Institute & SophiTEC) that wanted to make sure that our children were receiving the assistance they needed as quickly as possible so that they may thrive, and developed into a collaboration of organizations across the country working towards the same goal like the Boys & Girls Club, and local organizations such as, Upstate Cerebral Palsy, CIDS, SPCC, and The United Way, and finally, on to the collaborations of entire communities in Ohio (Aspire Toledo), Rochester and the Southern Tier (Get Ready To GROW Rochester & Chemung County).

Exciting news - there’s a new report in COMET!  It’s called the TCRS Percentile Report and is located under tabs Admin > Instruments reports.  Look in the section ‘Group Data Reports’ – it’s the last report on the list.

Why is it there?  We heard from multiple Primary Project teams that wanted a Pre/Post report that actually focused on students in the domains with pre percentiles at or below the 30th percentile – children ‘At Risk’ (16th to 30th) and at ‘High Risk’ (0 to 15th). 

What does it (or can it) do?  When selecting Primary Project participants, the TCRS is used as a tool to help facilitate this process. Typically children with one or more scores in the ‘At Risk’ area are selected.  This report allows you to see the pre/post results by domain (Task Orientation, Behavior Control, Assertiveness, Peer Social) for only those children.  Students above the 30th percentile not presenting needs aren’t included.  The report defaults to showing graphs for all domains with a percentile range from 0 to 30.  Like other reports, you can filter on:  School, Grade, and Group (such as Cycle 1 or Cycle 2).  In addition, one or all domains can be selected and the percentile range can be modified. You might want to see only children falling between the 15th and 30th percentiles. It’s your choice!  Another nice feature of this report is it lists the students along with their pre, post, and difference scores. 

Another request we heard was for a One Time report that only lists children falling in the ‘At Risk’ range to help in the selection process.  The report does this also!  For example, after you screen in the fall, select ‘One Time’ in the filter and the date range screening occurred – e.g., 10/1 to 10/30.  The report defaults to listing all students that fall at or below the 30th percentile in any domain.  Again, the percentile range can be adjusted. 

We hope you find this report useful, possibly in other ways than what’s mentioned above. 

Primary Project is a national evidence-based program that helps children in Pre-K through third grade adjust to school, gain confidence, social skills, and focus on learning. Begun in 1957, Primary Project is the foundational program of Children’s Institute. Schools who implement Primary Project use COMET to screen children in the early grades and identify those who may benefit from the program, they then complete pre-post assessments on COMET to monitor progress and report on results. Having the assessment tools available online, as opposed to paper, has increased response rates up to 98% and reduced turn-out time for results from weeks to instantly!

Written by our not-for-profit partner, Children's Institute.