In the strange and variable land of Kentucky, there is a childcare crisis. Seeking to address this problem is the Family Child Care Network of Kentucky. Within this Network, there are five different organizations focusing on different parts of the state. This project focuses on a group of KY counties within one those organizations, the Appalachian Early Childhood Network.
The Appalachian Early Childhood Network (AECN) covers 46 counties, which is broken up into two groups: the Cumberland Region and the Eastern Mountian Region. Currently, this project--initiated and developed as part of my learning with Code:Kentucky--focuses on the 28 counties of the Eastern Mountian Region, where the crisis of childcare deserts is most severe.
Using data collected from kynect.com and the US Census, this project seeks to identify where the childcare deserts are located in Eastern Kentucky. It also seeks to illustrate a comprehensive picture of the Eastern Mountain Region counties as a group, highlighting their unique challenges. Hopefully, with a more complete picture, audiences will have a better understanding of the obstacles that come with developing and supporting a robust network of quality early childcare options in the mountians of Eastern Kentucky.
The primary process of this project is outlined in a Juypter Notebook file titled "AECN_Capstone.ipynb" Viewers can see how I am exploring personally edited csv files initially obtained from the US Census website, seeking to develop interesting and helpful visualizations that will tell a story about the Eastern Mountian Region counties.
In the ipynb_process_files directory, viewers will see my in-progress journey of learning to clean and merge data with Pandas, Python's open-source library for data manipulation and analysis.
In the AECN_datasheets directory, viewers will bear witness to my in-progress and painstaking task of locating all the early childcare options within the 280 zip codes of the Eastern Mountian Region counties. My hope is to one day plot all the existing options by type on a mutuable map able to accept new family child care business as they open. I would also like to be able to run various analysis on the childcare options currently available, using Pandas and a completed EasternMountianRegion_Providers.csv file.
This project is on-going, documented here as a public repository for interested parties and to assist with my own trials of continuity.