One: If the District Were 100 Students

After attending Tapestry earlier this year, I decided that I wanted to showcase some different data stories. In my day job, I mostly work with student data---test scores, demographics, attendance, discipline, and so on. All good stuff in its own way. But there are lots of things that we collect and don't share, either because of student privacy concerns or just lack of trying.

It is my goal this year to tell ten new data stories in ten months. And while I'm a little later in getting the first one up and running, it's happening. Every story will have an online component with links to programs, data sets, or interactive views. Each one will also have an offline component. I've commandeered one of the bulletin boards in our district office. My goal with that piece is to make "touchable" data, and data displays that can be viewed and experienced regardless of Internet access. Out of all of this, I hope that we bring to light some new understanding to different audiences and create some interest in increasing the visibility of some our underrepresented students.

For (late) September, our focus is "If the district were 100 students." Maybe not the most original topic; however, it has given us a safe place to figure out how to put it all together.

Offline

For the main presentation, we selected six demographic attributes: homeless, low income, absences, dropouts, English language learners, and students of color.  Each of the squares you see has 100 push pins, with the colored ones representing the percent of students in that group.

For three of the groups, we created callouts that provide more detail. For example, our English language learners might only be 2% of our students, but more than 25 languages are represented by that group.

It's been fun to see and hear about people who touch the pins. I'm glad that they feel like they can. I have grand plans in the coming months to employ various paper pop-ups and other things that will invite some exploration with more than the eyes. I had someone comment that seeing the purple pins (representing low income) made her sad. So much of the time, we look at data as numbers on a page. It didn't make the same impact for her as seeing the display.

The rest of the display is devoted to information on enrollment changes, along with some projections by the district and city about the future of our demographics. None of this is earth-shattering or super-fancy, but it feels good to put it out there. It's time to start some different conversations about data.

Online
Each month, we're building a companion web page. This month, I created some simple waffle charts (to reflect the offline displays) and a line graph that users can interact with via Excel slicers. There is a QR code on the bulletin board which links directly to the online options.

A big focus for me this year is on being more transparent about the ethics involved in the choices made about these displays---from which data are (or are not) represented, to downloadable data sets, to the reasons behind the specific charts. It is a privilege for me to have access to the data that I have. It's also a lot of power...and somehow, I need to make sure that I publicly acknowledge that and invite comment.

Bonus Round
Next month...which is really sometime this month...I'll be presenting data related to a month in our board room. I know, that doesn't sound very sexy, but I think the Outlook calendars for that room will reveal a lot about our priorities and partnerships. It's not something we've ever looked at, which is why I think it will be an ideal candidate for this project.

Are you trying something new this year?