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Tribal Child Care Technical Assistance Center (TriTAC)
Effective Program Strategies

Child Counts Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs

Demographic Information:
The Warm Springs Reservation, located on roughly 650,000 acres in North Central Oregon, is home to the Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute tribes, collectively known as the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Approximately 4,000 tribal members live on the largely rural reservation, mostly in or around the small town of Warm Springs. Bordered by the Deschutes River on the east and the Cascade Mountain Range on the west, the diverse geography of the reservation supports an economy that is based primarily on natural resources, including hydropower, forest products, ranching, tourism, and recreation.

Type of Program:
The CCDF program of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs is an exempt program. The tribe’s Essential Education Services Department operates an Early Childhood Education Center that offers full-day, full-year child care and Head Start services. Home-based Early Head Start services are also available on the reservation. The Early Childhood Education Center serves all families living and/or employed on the reservation, thereby meeting the needs of CCDF- and Head Start-eligible families while also providing a recruitment/retention incentive for employees of tribal enterprises. Because the 300-child capacity center is state licensed, eligible families can pay for care using state CCDF subsidies.

Effective Program Strategy:
Beginning in federal fiscal year 2002, all Tribal Lead Agencies were required to submit with their biennial CCDF Plan a self-certified child count, a count of all Indian children under age 13 within the Lead Agency’s service area. Because tribal CCDF funding is partially allocated on a per-child basis, child counts are also submitted in non-Plan years as the application for that year’s CCDF funds.

Originally, ACF used existing, nationally published data for children under 16 (from the BIA Indian Service Population and Labor Force Estimates Report and other sources) as the basis for tribal child counts. The change to self-certified counts of children under 13 was challenging for many Tribes because such data was often not readily available within their communities. To allow Tribes time to develop systems and establish procedures for collecting and updating this data set, the Child Care Bureau gradually implemented the self-certification process over a number of years.

The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs developed their child count process in the first year that the Child Care Bureau offered the self-certification option. Knowing that it would soon be a requirement, the CCDF Administrator decided to get a head start on the challenging task of identifying data sources and turning the information into a usable child count.

First, she found a Tribal information systems (IS) staff person to help her develop the child count database and identify the best ways to acquire and organize the information. They determined that a simple approach would be most useful, so they initially limited their database fields to "first name," "last name," "date of birth," and "zip code." They included zip code information because the Tribe’s CCDF service area covers the reservation and surrounding areas, including the nearby town of Madras, where Warm Springs children attend public intermediate and secondary schools.

The CCDF Administrator then asked the Tribe’s Vital Statistics Department for the names and zip codes of all tribal members sorted by date of birth. The IS staff person used this data as the foundation of the child count database. The Administrator then requested name, zip code, and age data on Indian children under 13 from the Indian Health Service and the local public school district. To meet the Tribal CCDF Plan deadline of July 1 and to ensure that the data from different sources was comparable, she asked all of her sources to provide the data as of June 1.

The Administrator and her IS staff person entered all of the data into their database. They removed duplicate entries and sorted the results by age. This database produced Warm Springs’ first self-certified child count of Indian children under 13.

Because they put the time and effort into developing a comprehensive database and data acquisition process during that first year, the Warm Springs staff have found that successive child counts have been much easier to complete. Each year, the Administrator requests new lists from her original sources and compares these to the information in the database. As part of the Essential Education Services Department, she also has access to similar data for children in Head Start and Early Head Start, which is used to double-check the completeness of the database.

The annual child counts are also easier to complete because the Warm Springs staff update the database throughout the year as changes become available. For example, the IHS Maternal Child Health program provides the Administrator with periodic lists of new babies born in the service area. Children who move or pass away during the year are removed from the active child count list, but they remain in the database with a notation to indicate the reason for removal from the active list. The database automatically removes children from the active list when they reach age 13.

Resources:
The CCDF Administrator used the services of a tribally funded IS staff person to assist with database development. This development process took approximately 40 – 80 staff hours, including time to outline the database plan, create the database, develop database maintenance procedures, request the data, enter and modify the data, and perform other related tasks. A tribally funded staff person spends a comparable amount of time updating the database each year, inputting changes on a regular basis and conducting the formal annual update and count.

The database was developed using software (Microsoft Access) that already existed on their computers, so the Department did not need to purchase new software or hardware for this project.

Results:
The Warm Springs staff have identified several important outcomes from the development of the child counts database, in addition to the relative ease with which the annual counts are done. For example, the database enables the Essential Education Services Department to track potentially eligible children over time, regardless of where they start in the service delivery system. The database also enables the Department to plan its education programs more efficiently and to recruit children for enrollment in underutilized programs.

Because of the relationships that the CCDF Administrator built in the process of creating and maintaining this database, other agencies in the community now look to the Essential Education Services Department to provide this unique set of data. Using the child count database, they can provide the public school district with estimated numbers of children from the community who will be entering kindergarten, as well as the number of children entering school who have identified disabilities. The database also provides the community with its first database to track child mortality rates for Indian children.

The Essential Education Services Department also uses the database to support applications for state and private grants and tribal funds. Because they update the data regularly, they can say with confidence that they know how many children are in the community, how many they are currently serving, and how many could benefit from new or improved services.

Lessons Learned:
Despite the fact that the Warm Springs staff developed an effective process for creating and maintaining a child count database, they still face challenges in completing the child count task. One ongoing challenge is verifying whether children in the database are actually residents of the service area at the time of the annual update. Some children and families frequently move in and out of the area for personal or employment reasons or due to temporary off-reservation foster care placements. When children’s last names (and occasionally first names) change due to custody changes, this adds another layer of complexity to the task of creating an unduplicated count. Social Security Numbers would provide a standard unique identifier across programs and data sources, but privacy concerns make it difficult to get this information from other agencies.

Even without the use of Social Security Numbers, recent changes in privacy laws, such as those now in effect for IHS, create another challenge. These laws often make it more difficult to get data from an agency that is not part of the tribal government. Requests often have to be more formal than they were in the past, and it may take longer for an agency to provide the requested data due to lengthy approval processes. However, since the Warm Springs CCDF Plan’s definition of an Indian child includes children from other tribes living in the service area, it is important to use non-tribal data sources to get an accurate child count.

Developing good relationships with data partners is essential to creating and maintaining a complete child count database. Because of the privacy issues involved, it is important for data providers to feel confident that you are only using their information to count children. One way to ensure this is to implement appropriate security measures. At Warm Springs, only two people, the CCDF Administrator and the staff person assigned to input/update the data, have access to the child count database.

While it is important to restrict access to confidential information, it is also important to make sure that multiple staff members have the ability to program the database and retrieve information from it. If too few staff members have programming knowledge, you risk losing the ability to change or access your carefully crafted database when staff members move on to other jobs.

It is also important to put enough time into the database planning process to ensure that you are considering current and future needs. You may want to include more fields than just those necessary for the CCDF child count, since you may be the only one in your community keeping data on kids under 13. Thinking through these issues in advance could help you develop a database that is useful to other service providers in the area.

You may also want to talk to your potential data providers during the planning process to determine what software they are using. If your software is compatible, it may be possible to align your field names with theirs to make the transfer of data easier. Receiving your data electronically can save considerable amounts of data entry time and can reduce or eliminate data entry errors.

Contact Information:
Essential Education Director

Address:
The Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs
PO Box C
Warm Springs, OR 97761

Phone: (541) 553-3241
Fax: (541) 553-3379

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This page was last updated May 28, 2004.