The Wisconsin Risk and Reach Project

About the Wisconsin Risk and Reach Project

The Wisconsin Risk and Reach Project provides information about community risk factors and how effectively publicly funded programs reach children and families. The information and tools available here can help identify potential gaps in services within counties and across Wisconsin.

The information contained here is intended to inform state government, local advocacy agencies, and communities about areas of need for program expansion and investment. The project aims to promote constructive dialogue, deepen understanding, support data-informed decision-making, and encourage collaboration to improve the well-being of Wisconsin children.

Risk Factors

For this analysis, risks to healthy child development include factors related to economic insecurity, health and safety concerns, and educational outcomes. The analysis examines county-level risk indicators across these three domains and highlights areas that may benefit from additional support. The data notes provide detail about the sources and tabulation methods for each risk measure.

Program Reach

Reach factors include publicly funded programs that support economic security, health and safety concerns, and educational outcomes. With the exception of four-year-old kindergarten (4K), which is free when offered by a school district, the programs included here each have distinct eligibility criteria. For the purposes of this analysis, most of the reach measures reflect the percentage of eligible children participating in each program. When exact participation or eligible-population counts were not readily available, the data team used estimates or proxy measures. As with risk measures, the data notes provide detail about sources and tabulation methods for each reach measure.

Limitations

The maps, charts, and tables presented here provide a snapshot of risks to healthy child development and program reach. However, as with all data, they cannot fully capture people's lived experiences. Ultimately, child outcomes are shaped by a complex array of forces and the risk factors captured here reflect just a handful of the factors that can impact child outcomes.

Program reach measures rely on administrative data collected and maintained by federal, state, and county-led programs as a regular part of their operations. Although there are many advantages to using administrative data, including its readily availability and reliability, the data can also fall short of telling a complete story. For example, reach estimates do not account for variation in program intensity (e.g., a Head Start slot that provides a few hours of services per week versus one that provides 40 hours are treated the same). It does not measure a program's quality, the direct experiences of parents and children, or how well it is meeting the needs of a community. As mentioned previously, actual program participation numbers are not available in some cases. Instead, the research team relied upon the best available estimates. Moreover, this assessment does not account for local community and faith-based initiatives that help to support children and families, nor the informal networks of family and friends that help create resilience, even in places with significant needs.

Despite the limitations, this assessment can provide a starting point for more nuanced conversations by community groups, program leaders, and advocates, as well as state, county, and local decision-makers.

These measures of risk and reach are meant to be useful to communities and local leaders at the county level. Over time, the project aims to provide some of these measures at more detailed geographic levels, such as legislative districts, municipalities, and census tracts. However, it can be challenging to identify reliable data at these scales while protecting program participants' confidentiality. Likewise, program participation data disaggregated by race and ethnicity is either unreliable, subject to privacy considerations due to small sample size, or non-existent for most Wisconsin counties.

Finally, some programs and services operate under the exclusive jurisdiction of Tribal governments; those data may not be reflected in county counts because of Tribal sovereignty. The section below provides additional details regarding their selective inclusion in the data.

Programs Administered by Tribal Nations

Programs and services, in some instances, are run by a Tribal Nation. In child welfare, there are cases that are managed under their exclusive jurisdiction. Due to Tribal sovereignty, those data may not be reflected in the data summaries in the Risk and Reach assessment. The project team endeavored to incorporate Tribal program data into the county summaries when the Tribal Nation administered a program under a contract with the state agency (Wisconsin FoodShare), federal program data was made available (Early Head Start and Head Start), or the Tribal Nation provided a state agency with direct access to their data (Family Foundations Home Visiting).

The following is a partial list of Tribal programs and some detail about the number of children served, where we have information:

• Family Foundations Home Visiting: Participants of programs run by a Tribal Nation under a contract with the Wisconsin Department of Family and Children are counted in their county of residence. According to the 2020 Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Home Visiting Needs Assessment Update, an estimated 245 families in Wisconsin were served by a Tribal home visiting program.
• Wisconsin Shares Child Care Subsidy Program: Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin program participants are included in the Menominee County geographic area. Except for the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin counts, Tribal children served by Tribes are not included in the county aggregate data. Children not counted in the county data include 33 children served by a Tribe, 26 of whom were served by the Oneida Nation.
• Wisconsin FoodShare: Tribal run programs exist, and participants are counted in their county of residence in the Risk and Reach assessment.
• 4-Year-Old Kindergarten (4K): Tribal programs exist, but students in Tribal schools are not included in the county counts.
• Head Start Preschool: Tribal Head Start Preschool programs exist and are counted in their county of residence in the Risk and Reach assessment.
• Early Head Start: Tribal Early Head Start programs exist and are counted in their county of residence in the Risk and Reach assessment.

This Edition

This is the fourth edition of the Wisconsin Risk and Reach Project. Based on feedback from stakeholders, future editions will aim to expand and improve on the tool's utility.

Funding and Research Partnership

This project was made possible through the federal Preschool Development Grant awarded to Wisconsin to support a cohesive and comprehensive early care and education system in our state for children from birth to age five. The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF)administers the grant, in partnership with the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and the Department of Health Services (DHS), with research partnership from the Institute for Research on Poverty and the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.