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.

COMET Informatics LLC is pleased to announce the appointment of John Chapman, MS as their new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) effective Monday, April 19, 2021, following a planned CEO succession plan and unanimous approval from the board.  

With nearly 40 years of experience in the technology industry that include start-ups and fortune 500 companies alike, Chapman is excited about joining the COMET team and continuing to work and serve the Rochester community. “I am thrilled and humbled about the opportunity to join the outstanding team at COMET to help to continue their growth to the next level," says Chapman, “I am excited about their product offerings as well as assisting their clients to achieve their goals while further enhancing the customer experience.”

For the past several years, Chapman has been President of the JMC Advisory Group where he consulted with companies to execute GTM and sales programs, create and deliver product innovation, scaling operations/systems/process, and technology, enhancing customer experience, and assisting various organizations by filling interim CMO and COO roles. This work allowed Chapman to achieve results through collaboration and teamwork where accountability, customer-centric value and service were top priorities.

COMET’s current CEO, Leonard Gingello, MBA will officially retire Friday, April 16th, 2021 after being a part of COMET since its inception eleven years ago, four of those years as CEO and five as Board Chair. "I have deeply enjoyed the privilege of working with COMET's dedicated team and all the child care professionals, partners, and customers alike, who are so focused and passionately working to improve the lives of our precious children," says Gingello, “John is a great addition to the COMET team, and will serve our partners and clients well. I can retire with the knowledge that they are being left in the best of hands."

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).

The main purpose of community data sharing is to create a community-wide information system that supports interactions with many service providers to deliver a comprehensive, longitudinal perspective on each child, leveraging data and technology to provide better, faster, and continuously improved services. In Community Data Sharing Initiatives - Community Collaboratives - participants share information regarding the children they serve. It is essential to have a clear definition of how the sharing is managed and authorized and which information is shared. 

The Backbone Organization (Longitudinal Community Database) of the collaborative is the lead partner organization that is responsible for community agreements on data governance and data sharing, an agreed-upon approach to parent consent, collaborative goals, and the associated data set to be shared. This organization is responsible for Data Management Services: the “scoping” of data access for data sharing partners and users, defining the approach to mapping children between organizations, consent administration, and an approach to managing data quality. [e.g. duplicates]

• Legal Data Sharing - Community Agreement
• Organization & User Scoping 
• Child-Organization Mapping
• Consent Administration
• Data Quality

Data Users are partner organizations that are interested in accessing the Data Contributors’ child-related information either in aggregated, de-identified or identifiable format. The leverage the COMET Community Reporter. Commonly, Data Users are also Data Contributors, but not necessarily (e.g.: funding organizations like United Way, County, or City services).

• Aggregated & De-Identified Community Reports & Exports
• Geo-Coded Map Demographics
• Data For Program Evaluators
• Compare Your Organization To The Community
• Identifiable Data Reports & Exports, For Those With Proper Consent

COMET Operations

Data Contributors are partner organizations that directly interact with children and record child-driven information in COMET, or in their own operational database - Pass-thru Data Contributor -- that will be integrated into the data-sharing initiative. Another approach to contributing data is to provide program participation as a Roster Data Contributor through a list of your children (ID, last, first, DOB, gender). Note that contributors "own" the data they contribute in an explicit or implicit agreement of confidentiality [e.g.: Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act (FERPA)] with each child’s parent.

Data Contributors - Collected In COMET

• Community Organization Running Programs & Providing Support
• Funder Collecting Data From Multiple Service Providers
• School District SEL Program
• City Sending Data (Pass-Thru)

Data Contributors - Collected External To COMET

• Student Information Systems (SIS)
• Community-Based Organizations
• Government & Heath Systems

Parent Portal

Parent / Guardian involvement is key to a data-sharing initiative. COMET’s community data sharing solution supports parent approval of the sharing of their child’s data. Recording and leveraging parent consent is fundamental to a data-sharing initiative. 

• Parents Understand & Control Their Child's Data & Can See Their Child's Information, Including Assessment Results
• They Can Provide Input On Their Child & Communicate With Those Who Work With Them

Community Reporting 

COMET’s community data sharing solution is powered by our sophisticated reporting application - COMET Community Reporter, supporting aggregated and de-identified community reports and exports, geo-coded map demographic visualization, data for program evaluators, community comparison reports, and identifiable data reports and exports. 

• Aggregated reports: Typically, such reports may pull data from multiple Data Contributors and consolidate / aggregate accordingly. These reports are authorized through the data-sharing agreement between the service provider partners. 
• De-identified child-level reports or data extraction: Typically, these reports are used for research purposes. Records are de-identified meaning that they do not contain any data element that could identify a child (e.g.: name, ID, etc). These reports are authorized through data-sharing agreements between the service providers. 
• Identifiable child-level records: It is possible to report on identifiable child data, but this data sharing requires valid parent consent and clear authorization from the Data Contributor.

Only data sharing can enable outcome measurement across organizations. So, if an after-school program and a school want to measure if their collective work has a positive impact on school attendance and academic outcomes, and to determine which programs are effective and to fund, data sharing is essential.

Ideally, every community's child-serving organizations will share data and collaborate to improve common goals; realizing the vision of a comprehensive, longitudinal community database supported through the efforts of Partner Organizations that work together in a Community Data Sharing Initiative in which its children are thriving.

Ready to join a collaborative? Take our readiness quiz.

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.