Poon - EDI and CoRE-LAB

It [CoRE-LAB] came from thinking about what patterns we’re seeing in terms of what the EDI is telling us. So, we knew that the overall provincial vulnerability rate was staying stable at about a third of the children vulnerable on one or more developmental domains. But as we took a closer look at what was happening geographically in different regions, so we could look at it in terms of school districts, we could also look at it in terms of what you would call a community or a neighborhood. We would see that there are great disparities in those rates. And I was most interested in the wide disparity between certain neighborhoods and communities across the province. And we were seeing almost a five-fold difference in rates and in vulnerability and thinking, “What’s happening here when we see a community that has about 10% of the children vulnerable, 10, 11 and you’re getting 50 to 60% in other areas?” And that was the impetus for one of my first CoRE-LAB projects, which was trying to understand, maybe looking a little bit at some selected case studies. So, understanding where we might have geographically adjacent communities and trying to understand, you know, what are some community level factors that could be influencing some of the differences that we see. So, I’d say that that that population level data and the differences that we’re seeing in overall vulnerability across geography was a key driver. Along with that, as we were talking with different communities and those partners, we had conversations about some of the different domains of development. And we looked at some of the different subscales and the social competence and the emotional maturity subscales were a concern for our partners because they were seeing a rise in them over the years. And so, it was a shared interest and that was where it was an agreed upon sort of question for us to explore with communities to say, you know, this, this is a concern. And so, what can we do to better understand what could be happening within their community?