The Importance of Collecting Data on Infants-Toddlers Experiencing Homelessness

The term ‘equity’ has been talked about for many years, but what does it mean for Pennsylvania’s thousands of young children experiencing homelessness?  
  
A public health institute asserts that “equity is a solution for addressing imbalanced social systems. Justice can take equity one step further by fixing the systems in a way that leads to long-term, sustainable, equitable access for generations to come.”  
  
The Merrian-Webster website defines equity as ‘refers to fairness or justice in the way people are treated.’  
 
Many of us working in either the homeless housing and early childhood education systems have been asking "are children facing homelessness given equal access to high-quality early learning opportunities?" The answer lies in the data.

Many organizations are collecting data on this population but do not report it to a single entity for analysis. In the past year we have been working with our allies to encourage state and local officials to foster inter-system cooperation to improve our understanding of the prevalence and needs of infants and toddlers experiencing homelessness. If we do not know the participation rates of these children in programs like Head Start, home visiting, childcare, and others, we will not be able to answer the question.

The recent Pennsylvania Head Start report “A State-Level Brief contains the following data:

Participation of young children identified as experiencing homelessness in early childhood programs in Pennsylvania in 2022 (2021-2022): ​

Although likely an underestimate, the 3% figure above was used as an approximate percentage of young children experiencing homelessness in Pennsylvania. It was reported that the percentage of children under age 6 experiencing homelessness in the state increased from 2% in 2013-2014 to 4% in 2017-2018. Unfortunately, the current actual percentage is unknown. (Data source: US Department of Education. (2020). Early Childhood Homelessness State Profiles: 2013-14 to 2017-18. Washington, DC: US Department of Education. Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development Office of the Chief Data Officer.) 
  
What this data suggests is that children experiencing homelessness are not participating in early learning at a satisfactory rate, with the lowest rate being infants and toddlers. However, while many organizations and systems may have a field in their database asking about housing status, most do not ask this question as a standard practice, resulting in unreliable data.  

In April, we met with Pennsylvania’s Education Department Secretary, Dr. Khalid Mumin, to discuss the lack of quality data on infants-toddlers experiencing homelessness. He immediately said he supports improving the data, now comes the difficult work of figuring out how to make this happen.

How do multiple systems send data to someone who will aggregate the data and analyze it? We are realistic enough to know that it costs money, time, and talent to figure this out. This is a challenge that we have accepted, along with a group of leaders across the Commonwealth.  
  
State and local leaders discuss the need for equity for the most vulnerable and raise questions about the systems not providing equal access. Leaders in both the homeless housing and early childhood education system want to enroll their infants and toddlers into quality education. Now is our chance to make the homeless housing and early childhood education systems more equitable – and accountable - by capturing the data that will inform operational and enrollment strategies. 
  
Read the reports cited above:  
 
Read the state report 
Read the HopePHL report on Philadelphia ​