Going deeper in the data on Connecticut’s 119,000

With a new dashboard just released, it’s now possible to take a much deeper dive into the data underlying the report Connecticut’s Unspoken Crisis: Getting Young People Back on Track, which revealed in October that 119,000 young people ages 14 to 26 are at risk of dropping out of high school or are disconnected from work and school entirely in Connecticut.

Commissioned by Dalio Education, the Boston Consulting Group analyzed nine years of individual-level, longitudinal data compiled from the Department of Children and Families, the Department of Labor, the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, the state Department of Education and the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness — five of the 14 agencies that contribute to Connecticut’s state longitudinal data system, P20 WIN.

One of the key insights of the report is the extensive variation identified in the barriers faced by the 119,000 young people who are at-risk or disconnected, offering a more detailed look at a population that is often referenced as a single homogenous group. The report articulates a definitional framework with five distinct subgroups of young people, each of which faces a unique set of obstacles and requires a responsive set of interventions to successfully reconnect to school and work. This framework bridges the gap between our definition of the crisis and the actual work being done on the ground by countless youth development specialists, violence intervention professionals, job coaches, reentry navigators, and many others to stem the tide of young people experiencing disconnection, who see and experience these realities firsthand.

By leveraging longitudinal data, we can follow each young person over time in their journey to navigate public systems. The data model created to conduct the analysis enables us to uncover that the five subgroups of the definitional framework are all connected as part of a continuum, within which we can identify the point at which those young people who experience disconnection first presented signs of being at-risk. With this framework, the report’s findings become both relevant and actionable for practitioners and policymakers.

At the Connecticut Opportunity Project, the social investment fund of Dalio Education, we support our grantee partners with long-term, unrestricted grant funding marshalled through organizational coaching and technical assistance in support of their efforts to reduce community violence and successfully reconnect young people to school and work. This dashboard will help those nonprofits supporting young people to better understand and meet the need in their communities, as well as raise awareness with other funders of the critical importance of their work.

With similarities to the Measure of America dashboard, the 119k dashboard creates the opportunity for nonprofits, municipal leaders, families, and researchers to drill down into the report’s data. By utilizing the same definitional framework from the report’s analysis, this dashboard goes beyond conventional approaches for measuring the “opportunity youth” population with the categorization of “out-ofschool and out-of-work.” It captures data for five consecutive school years up through 2021-22, with filters that allow for dynamic adjustments to focus on a single year and to zoom in on a single town or perform comparisons between towns.

This flexibility allows users to interactively explore how the at-risk and disconnected population breaks down by sub-group as well as associations with demographic and institutional factors, including race/ ethnicity, sex, free- and reduced-price lunch eligibility, and involvement in services from supportive agencies such as DCF, DMHAS, or housing providers in the CCEH network.

The dashboard highlights the reality that this crisis is one that affects every community in Connecticut. Young people in Connecticut public schools experience being at-risk in Westport and Wilton just as they do in Griswold and Canterbury, and in New Haven and Hartford. The dashboard illustrates how having a relatively low percentage of at-risk young people compared to other communities does not insulate a town from having a rate of disconnection that is actually higher than that of its rate of at-risk students: in Wilton, only 9% of its high school students in 202122 were at risk, yet 12.5% of young people in Wilton in their first year after high school were disconnected. Young people may be graduating from high school, but they aren’t all prepared for the next stage in life and this tool allows everyone in Connecticut to learn more about what’s happening to the young people in their community.

We hope all those committed to being part of addressing this crisis will explore the dashboard to better understand the lived experiences of young people in their community, and the intersection between those young people’s experiences with services provided by the DCF, DMHAS, and CCEH.