1. In our county there is a hospital, St. Joseph Mercy Hospital
In our county there is a hospital, St. Joseph Mercy Hospital. A hospital where many of the babies are born. And the direction a family turns as they head out of the parking lot determines that new child’s opportunities.

2. If you head left out of the parking lot, you have one set of opportunities and if you head right, you have another set of opportunities. One is high opportunity and the other is low opportunity. Washtenaw County in Southeastern Michigan has about 46,000 students k-12, 9 districts, 13 charter schools.

3. This image shows the lowest opportunity areas in red and highest opportunity in blue. Like many communities, a highway splits the two.

4. County originated, with a grant from HUD, a project to look at the data across sectors to identify the specific census tracts with the lowest opportunity. Included partners from Office of Community and Economic Development, Public Health, Transit Authority, and the Washtenaw ISD as an education partner.
The data points are identified by the sector in this chart. We added four lenses to disaggregate the data. And collected in two data points five years apart so we could see if the change over time was moving in one direction or another.

5. This shows the highest and lowest opportunity areas with an overlay of youth under the age of 5. It shows that we have many of our youngest children in the lowest opportunity areas. (This trend toward more poverty in our youngest children is something that is also being identified in our hospital data.)

6. This shows the opportunity across our county
This shows the opportunity across our county. You’ve seen the lowest and highest opportunity areas in the previous slides, but you’ll notice the the orange areas are also low areas. These are our rural areas. The yellow is moderate opportunity, and the light blue is high opportunity. The circles represent the change in opportunity. The red circle are high decline in in opportunity over the last 5 years and the purple circles are high growth in opportunity. The greatest decline is in the lowest and low opportunity areas. The greatest growth is in the high and very high opportunity areas. So our gaps in the county are growing. We are asking ourselves, across sectors, how might we work together to address these trends. They are impacting our children, our families, our schools, our communities, and our long term stability as a county.

7. Example of child poverty rates now…

8. …And the change in child poverty over the last five years.

9. Zip codes shouldn’t dictate your opportunities in life
Zip codes shouldn’t dictate your opportunities in life. Paying attention to the actual data and trends around opportunity is an important first step.

10. For more information kirwaninstitute.osu.edu
Kirwan Institute at the Ohio State University handled all the data and created the data tool. We’d highly recommend checking out the work of the Kirwan Institute. The link to the Opportunity Index tool is listed in the middle of the screen. And, feel free to contact Scott or Naomi with any questions.
Scott Menzel, Superintendent
Naomi Norman, Asst. Supt.