by Maddie Margraf and Hannah Cerny
December 4th 2025
for Data Visualization for Allwith Prof. Jack DoughertyTrinity College, Hartford CT, USA
Access to school-based health centers (SBHCs) isn’t distributed evenly across schools, and that raises important questions about fairness in student health and wellbeing. The data we present explores how schools with and without SBHCs differ across key factors such as size, type, and grade level. Do larger schools have greater access to these critical health resources than smaller ones? Are traditional public schools more likely to host SBHCs than charter or technical schools? And how does access shift between elementary, middle, and secondary schools? By examining these patterns, we can better understand which students are most likely- and least likely- to have essential health services available right where they learn.
Our community partners want to gauge what types of schools SBHCs are located in and how many students those schools serve across each grade level. These are important factors for our community partner to know because they want to know where SBHCs are distributed across the state of Connecticut. Our partner wants to learn these factors so that SBHCs can be distributed fairly and be a resource to children who need it. So far we have found that the majority of schools with SBHCs in Connecticut are public schools. We found that there is a significant difference in the number of public schools with SBHC’s than any other school type. This shows that there is limited access to SBHC’s across school types. Though one may be able to infer that public schools having access to SBHC’s is a positive because this gives health care access to a larger population, across the board there is limited access to SBHC in relation to school type.
Research Questions: How do schools with and without SBHCs vary by demographics and resources such as:
1. Total student enrollment (large, medium, small schools)?
2. School type (traditional public, charter, technical, etc.)?
One of our research questions was to look at how enrollment and school sizes varies across schools both with and without School Based Health Centers. We calculated the median, in other words the average enrollment across schools with SBHC’s, which was 458 students. We then calculated the median of enrollment of schools without SBHC’s, we found the average enrollment of these schools to be 291 with programs and 392 without. This visualization depicts what percent of schools, based on size, have access to SBHC’s.
<Figure 1:Percentage of schools with SBHC's based health centers based on sizeinteractive chart
We defined Large schools as schools with over 1,000 students, Medium schools as schools with between 350-1,000 students, and finally we defined Small schools as schools with less than 350 students. Our findings concluded that medium schools had the largest percentage of school based health centers at 60%, Small schools were at 29.69%, and finally large schools were at 10.31%. These findings were interesting as we predicted that Large schools were most likely to have SBHC’s as they are more populated and potentially have more funding. However it does make sense that medium schools have more access to SBHC’s as they are more cost effective. Small schools may not have enough funding and large schools have a much higher enrollment, therefore medium sized schools have the right size enrollment to afford and cover SBHC’s and are overall most likely more cost effective than large and small schools.
One of the questions we were asked to answer by our community partner was how certain demographics change across schools with and without SBHCs. This visualization describes the data reflecting how school types with and without SBHCs vary. Some school types are far more likely to have an SBHC than other school types. The chart shows that 88% of CT Technical Education and Career schools have SBHCs, 67% College Affiliated Schools and Endowed and Incorporated Academies Schools have SBHCs
Figure 2: Percentage of schools with SBHC's based on school type interactive chart.
While raw numbers would show that SBHCs are primarily located in Public Schools, which show that out of the 332 schools with SBHCs 285 of them are Public schools, if you look closer the data tells a different story. We found not just the number of schools within each school type had SBHCs, but what percent of the total of each school type had an SBHC. We found there is a wide variation across school types with SBHCs. The chart shows that 88% of CT Technical Education and Career schools have SBHCs, while other school types have no SBHCs at all. This means that CT Technical Education and Career schools are the most likely to have an SBHC, even though they don’t make up the majority of total SBHCs. This is important information because our partners want to know who is getting their resources and where they are likely to be distributed. The data shows that only 33% of Connecticut Public Schools have SBHCs, with potentially high concentrations of need, and are less likely than other school types to have an SBHC. This information would be significant to our community partner because they care about SBHCs being it provides a clear visualization of what school types have and don't have SBHC’s. Looking at equity across schools, it is crucial to look at the school types themselves. The type of school can provide insight into the types of students SBHCs are serving.
To find which types of schools were most likely to have SBHCs we created a pivot table. For our columns we selected organization type to show most clearly how the number of SBHCs each school type had. We then found the percentage of each school type with SBHCs by dividing the total number of each school type by the number of schools within that type that have SBHCs. From this pivot table, we created a bar chart to visually represent how SBHCs were distributed across school types. We chose a bar chart to visualize this data because a bar chart clearly displays how drastically the data varies. The data is visually easy to process because of how it is presented as a bar chart. It clearly shows how some school types are significantly more likely to have an SBHC while other school types don’t have access to SBHCs at all.
To find what schools had a SBHC and which schools did not we were provided a sheet of data from Jack and from that we were able to do a XLOOKUP and find which organization codes were linked to having a SBHC and which were not. We created a code to organize the schools into which schools have SBHC’s and which do not. We divided the schools into groups 1 and 2, 1’s being the schools with access to SBHC’s and 2’s being the schools that do not have access. After cleaning up our data we created multiple pivot tables, first to find the median of enrollment for schools with SBHC’s and then to find the median of enrollment for schools without SBHC’s. While creating these pivot tables we found that with programs the median enrollment for schools without school based health centers drastically changed our results. Therefore we created two separate pivot tables to show the differences in our results. We created one table including programs and one excluding programs. We then went through our enrollment data and based on the total enrollment of schools we divided our data into small, medium, and large schools.
“Enrollment Report/Export (Legacy).” CT.Gov, https://public-edsight.ct.gov/students/enrollment-dashboard/enrollment-report-legacy.Accessed 2 Dec. 2025.