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.

Original Posting 16.03.17

We promise to instill in our students a belief in their abilities, an understanding of their potential for achievement, and a joyous spirit of optimism about the future.

The Greater Rochester Summer Learning Association (GRSLA), or summerLEAP, strives to transform the lives of Rochester City School District children by improving access to high-quality, tuition-free summer learning programs.  And they are doing just that.

summerLEAP programs have been recognized by the Anne E. Casey Foundation’s Campaign for Grade Level Reading as a national pacesetter community program. By the time they reach 3rd grade, summerLEAP scholars will have experienced four years of high-quality summer learning programming—programming that will help put a stop to the learning loss low-income children experience during the summer months, while simultaneously improving their math and reading skills.

The goal of summerLEAP is simple and measurable: by the time they reach 3rd grade, their scholars will be reading at level, meeting tough Core standards. summerLEAP kids learn to love reading, and summerLEAP wants to help them gain the literacy skills they need to build a strong foundation for high school, college, and beyond.

We at COMET and the Children’s Institute have been privileged to support the great work being done at SummerLEAP.  By capturing year-over-year program data from the partners within COMET’s database, evaluations are performed for both individual and group data. Evaluations are done for a given year and longitudinally. The data shows that the program is most effective over multiple years, and to have a lasting and positive impact on the students at least three summer sessions are required.  Our non-profit partner, Children’s Institute, functions as an independent evaluator for GRSLA programs. Not only having great data, but also understanding outcomes and demonstrating impact has taken summerLEAP to a whole new level.

Check out our summerLEAP COMET Case Study

Visit the summerLEAP website

Visit Children’s Institute website

Original Posting 10.05.18

From healthy birth weight to school readiness, Chemung County is on the path to tracking the developmental progress of all children from birth to age 5. The project started years ago with school districts wanting to look at school readiness. They worked with Children's Institute to bring RECAP to Chemung County. With RECAP they looked at assessing social-emotional health and other domains for Pre-K students with a focus on getting kids ready for kindergarden.

Jump forward a few years, enter CIDS and their infant registration program. Because of the smaller size of their county and having only one hospital, CIDS was able to interact with the families each time a baby was born in their county. At the hospital, a nurse would ask the family a few simple questions and record data about the mother and the child's health. The County had a goal of wanting to connect all this information together - from birth to school age.

The group decided to use COMET because of our connection with the Chemung RECAP team, who were already using the system. Two years later we've rolled out a case management system that records when a child is born and tracks referrals that may be made to programs like Nurse-Family Partnership or Healthy Families. As the kids grow and enter Pre-K, the system will have all their data going back to that initial infant registration on the day they were born. That's pretty cool!

Click the links below to learn more about this project!

Case Study

Project Overview