Large-Scale Disruptions and School/Community Resources: Children’s Longitudinal Health and Education Outcomes Using Linked Administrative Data

Large-scale disruptions such as disasters, epidemics, weather events, terrorist attacks, and more can lead to enduring rifts in children’s lives. This research will examine how significant disruptions to children’s health, education and overall well-being create lasting influence on health, development and social trajectories through the lifecourse, and the risk for long-term health outcomes. New York City (NYC), where the 1 million public school children are majority low-income (74%), is an ideal place to situate this research. In the health domain, changes in diet and physical activity and missed healthcare may increase incidence and exacerbation of chronic diseases like obesity, asthma and diabetes. Large-scale disruptions can cause stress and anxiety, with fewer of the usual mental health services supports available, posing risk for new and more severe health problems. Educational consequences are expected to be protracted – including declines in academic achievement (test scores), increases in chronic absenteeism, repeating grades, or high school dropout. The research leverages the NYC Student Population Health Registry (SPHR), a uniquely inclusive, longitudinal database of all NYC public school students, created jointly by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and NYC Department of Education to examine these and other outcomes. SPHR links multiple municipal data sources at the child-level, allowing us to examine the influence of disruptions on myriad outcomes. The impact of variation in child-level, classroom-level and school-level preventive health measures will be important to understand, and it is expected that neighborhood and school characteristics (income, health resources, emergency food resources, open space) will mitigate (or exacerbate) sustained impacts. Identifying sources of resilience, at either the individual or neighborhood level, is a public health priority. The specific aims are: Aim 1: Determine health and education changes among children 2-4 years after large-scale event onset compared to prior to the event using a new, comprehensive and powerful set of linked child-level administrative data. Aim 2: Determine how child-level, school-level and neighborhood-level mitigating factors influence the course of the response to the large scale disruptions. Aim 3: Determine the role of neighborhood and school resources in exacerbating or mitigating health and educational outcomes due to large scale disruptions.