Brussoni – 20 years of EDI

So, with 20 years of data, you can imagine the power of that, right? So, you can look across time for different cohorts of kids as well as within different developmental cohorts and kind of really dig into place. So, for example, we have the COVID 19 pandemic, a major global event. We can have a look at what was going on with kindergarten kids before that and then since that. And how it’s tracking across time. There are no other data like this. 

B.C. is unique in having the level of population level data that we have that are collected by HELP. So, what we’ve learned over time is that vulnerability rates have increased. We’ve seen a significant increase in vulnerability rates, unfortunately. So right now you have one in three kids in kindergarten who are vulnerable on one or more scales of the EDI. 

What we also know is that where you live makes a difference. There’s huge amounts of variability in terms of vulnerability rates for different neighborhoods. In fact, we have a 59% gap between the lowest and the highest vulnerability rate neighborhoods. That’s astounding. And frankly, unforgivable. 

And then, as I mentioned, we can look at so we can link EDI and other data to administrative data sets like health or educational outcomes to see, okay, so if we know what’s going on in kindergarten, how does that track as kids move throughout their lives and even grow? And so, for example, some of the research we’ve done shows that vulnerability rates on the social and emotional skills in kindergarten predict mental illness diagnoses at age 14. So, what that allows us to do is not wait to age 14 but understand what’s going on much earlier on and being able to have, it’s a lot easier to intervene early on than it is to try and fix something when time has passed.