❮ Projects page First Up

First Up (formerly DVAEYC) sought to analyze the availability of all high quality early childhood services in Philadelphia, including: child care programs at the STAR 3 and 4 level; Head Start programs under the auspices of private contractors as well as the School District of Philadelphia; and public and private PreK settings. This information would be correlated to demographic information that indicates childhood risk factors associated with poor academic and social/emotional performance. Additionally, it would be analyzed to assess the relationship between neighborhood need and neighborhood capacity. Their goal was to produce a map that not only would provide a visual representation of the relationship between family income and quality of child care programs, but also identify areas of need for high quality early childhood programs and oversaturation at the neighborhood level.

Lena produced a report for each City Council, House, Senate and Congressional district within Philadelphia that included:

• A table displaying the quantity of quality and non-quality child care programs in the district, quality programs per population 0-5 in the district with comparison to the Philadelphia average and ‘need value’ in relation to other districts of the same type.
• A district-wide map showing both the locations of quality child care programs and the “need value” layer.

She also created a series of maps that displayed:

• The “need value” layer
• Locations of quality child care programs.
• Quality child care programs per population 0-5.

These maps and reports were intended to be used with officials at the School District of Philadelphia and at the Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning, both to help them understand the spatial relationship between need and capacity in Philadelphia, and to inform policy decisions about neighborhoods in the city where resources need to be targeted to provide the maximum number of at-risk children with high quality early learning programs.