Early Childhood Demographics and Program Enrollment

Highlights

Record Level: Student by year by collection by program 
Record Count: approx. 50,000 students per collection per year 
Years Covered: 2012-Present 
Population Coverage: Student participants in state-funded early childhood programs

The early childhood researcher files contain commonly requested longitudinal student-level demographic and program data reported in the early childhood MSDS collection. Available datasets reflect information about early childhood demographics, and program participation. Currently, only four early childhood programs are required to report data to CEPI: GSRP (Great Start Readiness Program), GSRP/Head Start Blend, Sec 32p, and Sec 32p(4). However, several other early childhood programs are included. Data from the 2012 school year onward are available. Future year's school year data will be added near the end of the following summer. Early childhood data is obtained in three separate collections: fall, spring, and year. Data is available for a student during each collection and year in which they were enrolled in an early childhood program.

Demographics and Program Eligibility

Available data include the time invariant demographic information, such as gender and race, for students that participated in the the early-childhood programs that are required to report data to the state. The most recent gender and race reported are available for around 340,000 early childhood students.

Demographic variables by data collection are also available. It includes: DOB, gender, ethnicity, resident information (i.e., resident code, county name, residential LEA, zip code). Several variables indicating economic hardship are composites derived from participation in various Michigan Department of Education (MDE) programs, based on Supplemental Nutrition Eligibility collected by MDE and/or Direct Certification through the Department of Health and Human Services. Examples of these include homeless status, foster, direct certification, free lunch eligible, reduced lunch eligible, economic disadvantage, migrant eligible, and immigrant program. It also includes the institution names and school codes for submitting schools and districts.

Program Enrollment

Program Enrollment data include the program participation and details for the children included in the Demographics files. Variables recorded include: collection, fiscal entity, school code, provider license number, early childhood program code, program start and end date, program delivery method (i.e., school based, home based, and community based), program exit reason. Three variables are only available for 2018-on: program license number, federal poverty level quintile, additional eligibility factors (i.e., diagnosed disability, severe or challenging behavior, primary home language other than English, etc.), and additional qualifying factors (i.e., homeless, foster care, qualifying IEP). The TABLE_ID variable is used to join the annual demographics data to annual program data for a particular observation.

Note that the information for all programs is not available for all years. A majority of the data available (approximately 40,000 students per collection) concerns students in GSRP or GSRP/Head Start programs. The table below describes the availability of the data on a yearly basis, and programs that were required to report information. Head Start reporting is only required if the program is jointly funded with GSRP, thus data for stand alone Head Start centers is limited (approximately 5,000 students per collection). In fact, comparing the total number of funded Head Start slots reported in the 2017 Michigan Head Start Profile, the coverage of Head Start is suggested to be around 27%. Across all unique student IDs from 2012-2018, the four programs required to submit data to the State of Michigan plus Head Start represent about 85% of all records available for these data.