Saint Paul 3K
Mapping Access to Childcare in Saint Paul
Overview of the Project
The goal of Saint Paul 3K is to provide a city-wide early childhood education program for all 3- and 4-year olds in Saint Paul. Our work is centered on gathering primary data, summarizing the current state of childcare in the city, and highlighting areas for improvement.
This StoryMap contains information about our primary data collection process, summaries of childcare availability in each Saint Paul ward, and an accompanying suite of informational maps of Saint Paul. For more information about this project, scroll to the end for our acknowledgements.
Understanding childcare by ward
What unique challenges does each ward face to accessing childcare?
Access to childcare varies throughout Saint Paul. We designed an infographic for each ward in the city to illustrate these disparities.
Curious about the state of childcare in your ward?
Click on a ward in the map at left to find out more, or keep scrolling to view these graphics interactively.
A note on data assumptions:
It is important to note that there are many complex factors that go into child care decisions -- and thus into the surplus or deficit numbers by ward. For example, children residing in Saint Paul may attend preschool outside of Saint Paul, or vice versa. Additionally, we cannot make assumptions about why women do or do not participate in the labor force, for example. Unfortunately, many of these variables cannot be reasonably measured. We present these infographics as our best approximation of the state of childcare in Saint Paul.
A note on web hosting:
To view the host site for the dynamic infographics, click here .
To contact the administrator, contact Ashley Nepp at anepp@macalester.edu
Exploring citywide trends
How do factors affecting access to childcare vary across Saint Paul?
We designed the following maps to provide background information for our ward-by-ward infographics. Many of these maps identify populations who face additional challenges in seeking childcare, such as non-English speakers or single parents.
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Exploring cost, capacity, and access
What did we do to improve our cost and capacity data?
A large portion of our work was in conducting primary data collection. We called every licensed childcare provider in Saint Paul to gather information about the cost of their program as well as their actual capacity – the number of 3- and 4-year olds they can serve at any given time. You saw our results above in the ward-by-ward infographics and Saint Paul maps. The following slides provide an overview of our process.
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About this project:
This StoryMap was created by the Fall 2019 Urban GIS class at Macalester College, taught by Prof. Laura Smith and Ashley Nepp. For more information on the Geography Department at Macalester College, click here .
The project was conducted in support of Saint Paul City Councilmember Rebecca Noecker’s work on the Saint Paul 3K Initiative, and built upon the work completed by the Fall 2018 Urban GIS class.
The goal of the Saint Paul 3K initiative is to make affordable, high-quality preschool available to every 3- and 4-year old in Saint Paul. For more information on the initiative, or on the benefits of early childhood education, click the link below.
About our data:
Thanks so much to the many individuals and organizations that provided guidance and data to this project. In particular, we'd like to thank Angie Bowman from Child Care Aware of Minnesota for her help providing data on child care providers in the Twin Cities; Rob Grunewald from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis for sharing his knowledge on the importance of early childhood education; and finally, of course, Councilmember Rebecca Noecker and Legislative Aide Taina Maki for their support, feedback, and guiding vision.
Other data acknowledgements:
- Ward boundary file courtesy of Saint Paul Open Data.
- Infographic data courtesy of ESRI and the ACS (US Census Bureau).
- Title photo courtesy of Flickr user woodleywonderworks
