About

This was created by Kelly Ervin Mills as a final project for the MICA MPS Data Analytics and Visualization Program's Design Lab: The Industry Challenge course during the Summer 2023 semester.

Inspiration & Goal

I live in an extremely under-resourced school district in rural Appalachia. In college, I volunteered at the local Head Start center and was struck by how much of a difference early educational intervention can make for children with varying disadvantages who are struggling to keep up with their peers. I wanted to expand that line of thinking into K-12 schools and create a piece that can draw attention to those who need it most.

In an interactive “scrollytelling”/visual essay format, I wanted locate and draw attention to school districts that likely have the most students who have fallen behind and are struggling educationally.

Audience

My primary audience is constituents in school districts with the most at-risk students. I believe this is useful for anyone interested in K-12 education in America. But, I am specifically targeting people living in the most affected school districts. I want the stark contrast between the highlighted districts and the rest of the country to hit home for those who call those places home. I hope that the realization that their communities are in need will compel members of my target audience to answer the call to action by contacting their representatives to advocate for funding for their local students.

Data

The data fueling this project is The Urban Institute's " Household Conditions by Geographic School District " dataset. From The Urban Institute: "This dataset describes the share of households within a geographic school district with conditions that may affect remote K–12 learning environments, such as linguistic isolation, crowded conditions, and access to a computer and broadband internet."

Process

I started by loading the Urban Institute dataset into a Jupyter Notebook and used the Pandas library to clean and pare down the data. Then I imported a supplemental dataset to add County FIPS identifiers for the Urban Institute data. I removed duplicate counties, which may have led to inaccurate conclusions about counties containing multiple school districts. A Pandas GroupBy operation and a proportional average of the school districts making up each county would remedy this. Time constraints for this project did not allow for this correction, as GroupBy can be finicky.

At this point, the data required to fill in choropleth graphs was exported to a CSV. That CSV went into an Observable Notebook where I used Observable Plot to create a county choropleth of each a ttribute from the Urban Institute data.

I exported the choropleths into Canva and manually added callouts to highlight counties of interest and ensure the maps all lined up correctly. All these Canva assets went into my site, which uses Scrollama.js for the sticky scrolling functionality. The rest of the work was basic web development.

Evolution

This project has evolved a great deal from its inception. After submitting my concept pitch for review, the feedback that stood out most was that the project was "ambitious." I dreamed of creating a large interactive scrolly-telling exploratory piece with many moving parts. That would have involved reusing some old code but also a lot of piecing things together and wrestling with web development. After that feedback, I decided I needed to work hard to not get in my way. I wanted to focus less on coding a bunch of stuff and more on refining what I did have. I cut out the time-based component of my visualization and removed the interactivity that would've been a reuse of a previous project. The narrower scope, I feel, has allowed me not to bombard the user with information and exhaust them - something my original concept definitely would've done. This final concept keeps the story digestible and the user fresh until the call to action at the end. I believe not forcing the user to get lost in the weeds serves the goal of having users take action to contact their representatives.

My audience has also evolved a lot since starting this project. I originally wanted to target "the American public and especially policymakers who have the power to direct resources and funding to school districts in need." This audience was too poorly defined, and I felt directionless in my design. I pared it down to target residents in counties in need. Narrowing the audience and creating a specific call to action instead of just asking people to care about and explore the issue gave the visualization much more purpose and direction.

This isn't the most technically ambitious project I have completed. However, I have grown a lot through this process. I am a software engineer, and coding is just so much fun for me that I get carried away seeing what I can create until I have a big mess that is exhausting to wade through. Learning to exercise restraint in my design is my most significant accomplishment of this project, and I feel like it is the cleanest story I've told.

Accessibility

While this project isn't 100% section 508 compliant, some design decisions were made with visual accessibility in mind. This project uses the Open Dyslexic font throughout to increase readability. All charts use single-color scales that are equally visibly accessible to people with all types of color-blindness. The single-color scale is also less stimulating for some neurodivergent folks. Font and background color combinations all meet to WCAG AA contrast requirements.

Additional changes can, and should, be made to make this project accessible for a wider audience. Due to time limitations, all charts are static assets, including the callouts. However, all the callout text is duplicated in the scrolling text. The charts require detailed alt-text descriptions to make sense for screen readers. All efforts should be made to adjust the font/background color combinations to be WCAG AAA compliant instead of just AA.