Building an improved data collection tool for early childhood care and education

Summary

The challenge

The Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC) oversees and funds a statewide network of more than 400 early childhood care and education providers. These programs help set children up for long-term success, and they also give families dependable childcare that supports stability and workforce participation.

Funding decisions depend on accurate enrollment information — specifically, knowing how many eligible children are enrolled at each provider site. When enrollment data is incomplete or inconsistent, it’s harder to allocate resources fairly and quickly, and it becomes difficult to understand what’s happening across the system.

Before Skylight’s engagement, OEC’s existing data collection system made that difficult. Providers often couldn’t easily update or correct records, which led to duplicate child profiles and inconsistent identification numbers. Many providers opted out of the system altogether, instead tracking enrollment in disconnected tools like PowerSchool, QuickBooks, spreadsheets, or even paper files.

The result was a fragmented, unreliable view of statewide enrollment. Data was hard to reconcile, often outdated, and difficult to trust — leaving OEC in the position of making high-impact funding decisions without the clarity needed to do so confidently.

OEC needed a system that made accurate reporting the easiest path for providers, while giving the agency a consistent, high-quality data foundation.

The solution

Skylight partnered with OEC to design and build a modern enrollment reporting system — the Early Childhood Education (ECE) Reporter — focused on usability, data quality, and long-term sustainability.

The ECE Reporter streamlined monthly reporting into a single, user-friendly workflow that gave providers more control over their data. It leveraged existing information to link and reconcile records across reporting periods, reducing manual entry, minimizing errors, and eliminating the need for providers to create or manage unique child IDs.

Skylight delivered this work by:

• Building a centralized, standardized data store for statewide enrollment data
• Redesigning the reporting dashboard to simplify uploads, corrections, and ongoing maintenance
• Adding flexible data visualizations and filters to support analysis and decision-making
• Developing a probabilistic matching algorithm to identify and resolve duplicate child records
• Using agile, iterative delivery practices aligned with the U.S. Digital Services Playbook to get working software into users’ hands early and often

This approach produced a reporting experience that providers chose to use. Providers could log in, upload current enrollment data, review site-level summaries, and maintain accurate rosters without re-entering the same information month after month.

One of the easiest data portals ever — I entered 30 individual kids and it didn’t even take me 30 minutes. It was very quick.

For OEC, the improved data foundation enabled more precise funding decisions and better visibility into anomalies like duplicate records, unusual enrollment shifts, and reporting inconsistencies. This strengthened stewardship of public funds while ensuring resources reached qualified children in qualified programs — ultimately supporting better outcomes across the early childhood system.

To support long-term sustainability, Skylight helped OEC take full ownership of the platform by updating operational scripts, strengthening test coverage, refactoring the codebase for maintainability, delivering clear technical and operational documentation, and completing DevOps work to enable a smooth handoff and ongoing operation.

With these capabilities in place, OEC was well positioned to maintain and evolve the ECE Reporter over time. The platform also served as a blueprint for modernizing data systems across other programs and agencies within the State of Connecticut.

The results

• Enabled 508 users across 220 providers to submit and maintain monthly enrollment data
• Standardized enrollment reporting across 397 program sites
• Covered 14,000+ enrollments with improved statewide visibility
• Reduced duplicate child records and IDs to improve accuracy and confidence in counts
• Transitioned full operation and maintenance of the ECE Reporter to OEC for long-term sustainability