Health and Colorado’s Kids: Interactive Dashboards

Question: Where in Colorado are high school students most likely to skip school because they feel unsafe?

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Answer: Pueblo County, where eight percent of high school kids say they have stayed away from school out of fear. The region west of metro Denver that includes Clear Creek, Park and Teller counties is a close second.

Question: Where are high school kids most likely to carry a gun, knife or other weapon to school?

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Answer: A four-county region surrounding Steamboat Springs in northwestern Colorado, where 14.2 percent of high school kids say they have carried a weapon on school property.

Question: Where are high school kids most likely to report they’ve been threatened, or even injured, by a weapon at school?

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Answer: Sadly, the answer to this question is also Pueblo County.

The Colorado Health Institute today launches a series of interactive dash boards, accompanied by in-depth analysis, focusing on the rich new dataset provided by the 2015 Healthy Kids Colorado Survey. Click — or, actually, hover — over sections of the dashboard to delve into the data.

Our first focuses on violence and high school kids, with analysis by Research Analyst Maggie Bailey.

The survey collects health information every other year from Colorado public school students. About 16,000 high school students took the 2015 survey. Results are tabulated on a statewide basis as well as by demographic characteristics. The data are also broken out regionally.

Sara Schmitt, CHI’s Director of Community Health Policy, is leading this project. Sara’s knowledge of public health issues in Colorado is invaluable as we delve into these new data.

Chrissy Esposito, who is working at CHI as a data visualization and storytelling intern, is creating the interactive data dashboards using Tableau software. Chrissy is a newly-minted graduated of the Masters in Public Health program at Colorado State University, where she honed her skills in geospatial analysis. (That’s also known as mapping.)

We think that the ability to visualize data in new and interactive ways will help our stakeholders across Colorado use information and analysis from us even more effectively. We’d love to hear what you think. Email me at goekend@coloradohealthinstitute.org with comments, questions or ideas about data you’re interested in.