Plan: Finding the PK4 seats in Nashville

For the planning of PK4 expansion in Metro, one of the issues we need resolved is current capacity across the county. To be sure, I haven't heard any talk about replacing the current providers of PK4/care. But at the very least, to determine how many children are not being served by anyone, we need to know how many children are currently served by providers outside the MNPS system. In short, I will approach it based on where the money comes from -- whether the service is paid for out of public funds, private funds, nonprofit services, or for-profit entities.

Here are the bones of my initial plan:

First, find the publicly funded providers of PK4 in Davidson County. 

This should be relatively straightforward; despite the myriad public funding streams, many of the public pre-K classrooms in Nashville are administered through the district itself. I will be able to use the NCES database search function to build an initial list of MNPS sites, and check those sites against the district lists provided by the PK office down the hall. They are also listed online, for what it's worth.

I also need to find the PK4 seats that are through Head Start administered by the Metro Action Commission. (For this planning, I will make the assumption that MAC will retain its HS contract and capacity, based on my understanding of the situation from what I've read in the paper.) Yes, I understand that Head Start and anything called "pre-kindergarten" are not the same, can be different in their approaches, etc. That's not actually the point at the moment: I am looking for the total number of seats for 4YOs in facilities across the county. The questions of quality, content, etc., are relevant, of course, but at a later place in the process.

Although I do not know of any charter schools in MNPS that currently serve 4YOs, I will still need to check with the district charter office to make sure. Fortunately they are upstairs!

Second, find the for-profit and nonprofit private providers. 

This will be a bit more tricky, since "private" can encompass a number of terms depending on who says it. Initially I want to find the private schools that serve PK4. Fortunately the NCES has a database for that, too. It makes sense to check it against any list built by the district, but they only have to keep track of schools that interact with the district in some way (so it won't be a comprehensive list).

I also want to find for-profit business entities that include 4YOs in their care. I know that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports employment data nationally for people who work in childcare (under the NAICS code 624400 - Child Day Care Services), so I will follow the advice of these lovely folks at the WUSTL library and start with a query through LexisNexis using the NAICS code as a filter.(1)  UPDATE: I can also query by primary SIC code, 8351 Child day care services. Combining the two outputs, I end up with 67 private providers with the relevant NAICS or SIC codes that are located within Davidson county. But I do not have any idea whether these 67 providers are still in business, so that is a downside. Also, that number feels really low to me, so surely this query missed some of the providers.

Last of the private provider categories: nonprofits that serve 4YOs in a full-day or half-day capacity. This is a big and potentially slippery category, because it can encompasses providers from churches to social service agencies. I am in luck, since the state of Tennessee has an online Child Care Provider function that lets me search by county (Davidson).

... but perhaps that is as far as my luck goes, since the search for providers in Davidson county returns 28 zip codes with over 480 providers listed. Yikes! That's a lot. Surely some of these are duplicates from the lists generated thus far? I will ask around and see if someone has a connection at the DHS who could pull this data for me from the back-end database: although I do not mind matching the lists by hand, I really do not want to type these entries into a spreadsheet, and scraping it off the web seems excessive when there are 28 pages.

I wonder why the DHS search engine does not have a "download" button for these providers? Surely the database is already built, the info is already public, etc. Life's mysteries.




**** Notes ****
(1) This is the first place thus far in the project where I am taking advantage of a behind-a-paywall resource. This is available to me thanks to the university where I just finished my MPP, and therefore still have a couple months of access to library resources. I recognize this is probably not ideal, but at least I am being transparent, if not totally replicable.


All opinions expressed here are my own, and do not represent MNPS, Vanderbilt's Peabody College, or anybody else unless explicitly quoted.