Introducing the Kansas Children and Youth Fiscal Map
Alice Fitzgerald | October 9, 2024
Over the last year, Kansas Action for Children and Children’s Funding Project have been working together to create the Kansas Children and Youth Fiscal Map.
Key partners helping provide budget data include the Kansas Division of the Budget, University of Kansas Center for Public Partnerships & Research (CPPR), and the Kansas Children's Cabinet and Trust Fund. We hope this tool will demystify funding for children’s programs and demonstrate opportunities to help kids and families in our state.
The Kansas Children and Youth Fiscal Map is an interactive Power BI dashboard from which anyone can narrow down and discover the amount of funding allocated for specific programs related to kids. For an overview of the dashboard and Children’s Funding Project's national effort to have a fiscal map for every state, please watch our Fiscal Map Launch Webinar recording.
The Fiscal Map includes dollars appropriated by the state and federal government for funding children’s programs for Kansas fiscal years 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. The Power BI dashboard enables users to find specific programs based on the desired outcomes, eligibility criteria, eligible services, and age impacted for each of the available years. Users can interact with data visualizations to find specific data and trends, such as for federal or state funds or specific funding streams.
Example: Child Care in the Kansas Budget
Kansas is addressing an ongoing child care crisis — a crisis where families struggle to afford and find child care, and providers struggle to make ends meet. Parents often rely on other family members and neighbors when they cannot find or afford quality child care environments. We know the impact of high-quality early learning experiences, including increasing positive life outcomes and reducing medical, corrections, and special education costs in the long-term.
Access to child care improves the economy now by ensuring parents can go to work and in the future by promoting happy, healthy future citizens of our state. This is where state funding to address the needs of thousands of working Kansas families is necessary.
By navigating to the fourth page of the dashboard (as seen at the bottom of the above example in the page navigation slider) and checking “Child Care Access” and “Child Care Quality” in the “Eligible Services” choice window, we can see Kansas saw a major spike in spending in FY 2021.
Then by clicking on “Federal” in the Funding Level graph, we can see how much of the overall funding came from the federal government. In this example, $583.6 million was allocated by Congress for child care access and child care quality, showing much of the funding spike in FY 2021 came from federal funds.
Then in the lower selection pane, clicking the “Funding Stream Name” will further show a breakdown and will be reflected in the bar graphs. In our example, we clicked on Child Care and Development Fund Block Grant (CCDBG) and held down the shift key while clicking on the second line item (selecting shift allows users to view multiple line items at once). Choosing both of these allows us to see the combination of funds going toward child care access and child care quality.
This example shows that in FY 2019, nearly $67.0 million in federal funds were invested in Kansas, primarily through the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which provides child care assistance to low-income families to cover a portion of their child care tuition. Using the fiscal mapping tool, we can see a dramatic increase in federal funds toward the end of FY 2020 (i.e., the state fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2020) as pandemic assistance became available. Continuing into Kansas FY 2021, we see even more federal dollars sent to our state to help providers and families. But much of those federal funds were a one-time appropriation, as illustrated by a stark decrease in FY 2022. Though FY 2023 is not yet shown in this fiscal map, a trend of decreased funding after FY 2021 is evident.
Important Things to Know for Using the Kansas Children and Youth Fiscal Map
The Kansas Children and Youth Fiscal Map includes only appropriated funds (those allocated by the Legislature), not actual funds (dollars spent by agencies). Appropriated funds indicate funding priorities of elected officials, which is why the fiscal map focuses on these allocations.
Additionally, any funding item relating to capital improvements (infrastructure spending on a state asset, like an agency’s office building) was not included in the fiscal map as those items generally fall outside of operating budgets and are expended over multiple fiscal years.
As this project is repeated for other states and should serve as a tool for state-to-state comparison, the Children’s Funding Project set five outcome categories for identifying the funding streams for children in a state budget:
- Safe
- Supported and Connected
- Healthy
- Educated
- Employed
Additionally, there are 60 “Eligible Services and Program” categories, including home visiting, youth workforce development, child care access, K-12 education, and more.
Kansas follows the precedent of other states’ fiscal maps by not including Medicaid funding (both state and federal), so state comparisons should be more accurate. However, Medicaid funding is slated to be added in future updates for all states in the project.
For children and youth programs, K-12 funding is the largest portion of the Kansas budget. Because of this, we recommend deselecting K-12 from your view when looking at the “Services” page to control for the funding outlier.
While each line item listed under “Funding Stream Name” on the “Services” page reflects the line item names, it does not mean any one item is the total amount of funding going toward that intended outcome.
Future Updates
As more states complete their own fiscal maps, we can continue to use the map to compare similar states. Looking at what other states do best can inspire us to implement similar programs in a way that suits the unique needs of Kansans.
We are excited to have the opportunity to use this tool as a jumping-off point. We hope the data will inspire us and our partners to ask questions about funding and funding trends to identify ways to better address issues facing kids in Kansas. We all know that the earliest years of a child’s life are the most crucial and that early investments in children’s education, safety, health, and well-being have the highest rates of return. Every dollar we invest in children now returns between $7-$12 in the future. We hope the fiscal map will show areas where our investments are lacking and where we should target for the best outcomes for Kansas kids.
Questions about what you're seeing presented in the fiscal map? Contact Alice Fitzgerald at [email protected].
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