Early Childhood Atlas Assists Alabama Emergency Preparedness Agencies

APRIL 5, 2007│ The Early Childhood Atlas Readiness Project recently shared geographic datasets with two emergency preparedness agencies in Alabama.

The project, part of the Mississippi State University Early Childhood Institute, prepared spatially enabled datasets of locations and other information about early childhood programs and K-12 schools for the National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office in Huntsville, Ala., and for Virtual Alabama, an initiative of the Alabama Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

The Early Childhood Atlas Readiness Project is an ongoing project to collect, merge, and spatially enable data about early childhood services and their disaster risks. Spatial enabling involves assigning latitude and longitude to the locations of services such as child care centers and pre-kindergarten programs. The Atlas database contains variables such as type of program, authorization to receive federal child care subsidies or meal subsidies, hours of operation, and maximum capacity, as well as proximity to disaster risks such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes.

The Atlas datasets will enable the Alabama agencies to include early childhood programs in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi in emergency planning and in dangerous weather alerts.

The Huntsville Weather Forecast Office serves northern Alabama. Virtual Alabama combines geographic and three-dimensional data into an online system that is a tool for homeland security, emergency management, and other public agencies.

Initial funding for the Early Childhood Atlas was by the National Center for Rural Early Childhood Learning Initiatives, a program of ECI, thanks to Grant #P116Z05-0056 by the U.S. Department of Education. (The contents of the atlas do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education and users should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.) The W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Day Foundation, Save the Children, and the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies have provided additional funding for the Early Childhood Atlas Readiness Project.

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