SRI Climate and Education Initiative

The SRI Climate and Education Initiative investigated how extreme weather events disrupt Head Start and Early Head Start programs and the implications for enrollment and service delivery. We found that Head Start sites located in communities that experienced an extreme weather disaster were more likely to temporarily or permanently close in the year following the disaster. Sites that remained open after an extreme weather disaster served more children in the following year, but services were disrupted — they provided developmental screenings to a lower percentage of children. The findings have implications for supporting programs to maintain essential services following disasters and highlight a need for coordination between the Office of Head Start and state and federal emergency management agencies.

Disaster management is an increasingly important responsibility for state and local education agencies, creating a need to link weather and education data in ways that are meaningful to education leaders. The SRI Climate and Education initiative linked Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Stanford Education Data Archive, Common Core of Data, and Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates data to describe extreme weather events across U.S. school districts. Using spatial analysis, we found that an overwhelming majority of school districts were impacted by extreme weather over 10 years. These analyses provide the first step in supporting education agencies to integrate data for real-time monitoring and planning, build capacity for data storytelling, and identify impacts on student outcomes.

Throughout the SRI Climate and Education Initiative, we have identified several methodological challenges and limitations that may bias impact estimates and obscure true effects, particularly around using integrated district-level education data and county-level weather event data to estimate the effects of weather events on student achievement. These challenges include imprecise geographic linkage between weather events and school districts, a lack of detailed measures of event intensity, and preexisting district differences and post-disaster population displacement biasing impacts. The lessons learned from this methodological work can inform data analytic choices and partnership decisions in future climate and education research efforts.