Maria Markosyan and Mikayla O'Brien
Last updated on December 2, 2025
for Data Visualization for Allwith Prof. Jack DoughertyTrinity College, Hartford CT, USA
Access to healthcare can play a major role in shaping students’ academic and personal success. School-Based Health Centers (SBHCs) are on-campus clinics that provide medical, mental health, and dental services directly to students. The services provided are beyond typical nurse’s offices and ensure there is preventative care.This analysis explores how the presence or absence of SBHCs relates to the percentage of high-needs students within schools. High-needs students in this instance includes students receiving free- or reduced-price lunch, Multilingual learners, and Students with Disabilities. Analyzing the variation between schools with and without SBHCs based on the percentage of high-needs students helps us understand the correlation between the amount of high-needs students and whether or not a SBHC is placed.
Overall, we discovered important patterns regarding the demographics of schools with SBHCs in comparison to schools without SBHCs. We found that when looking at all demographic categories, schools with SBHCs have consistently larger median percentages of students with high-needs, in comparison to schools without SBHCs. This pattern holds true for each category -- higher percentages of English Language Learners, Free/Reduced Price Lunch eligibility, Students with Disabilities -- and the combination of all three together, called High-Needs Students. Overall, this means that schools with more high-need students are more likely to have SBHCs and can potentially have more need for it than schools with less high-need students.
Understanding this relationship is important for our community partners, who work directly with students and families most affected by gaps in access to care. When School-Based Health Centers are placed where need is highest, partners can more effectively coordinate services, identify barriers, and advocate for resources that directly support student well-being. Conversely, when high-needs populations lack access to on-site health services, community organizations often shoulder the additional burden of connecting families to off-campus providers, navigating transportation challenges, and addressing unmet health needs that can hinder student learning. By examining how SBHC placement aligns with student demographics, our partners gain valuable insight into where support is most critical and where collaborative efforts can have the greatest impact.
School-based Health Centers are a fairly recent development, and their addition to the schools are dependent on many factors, such as the number of students on the state-provided health insurance, the location of the schools, etc. Those factors help determine how much a SBHC would benefit the school. To better understand the current status of the distribution of schools with and without SBHCs, let’s look at the map below.
As the map below shows, currently, there are much more traditional public schools without SBHCs than with them. Additionally, a significant portion of the schools with SBHCs are concentrated in the cities, especially in Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport.
Explore the interactive chart to find out more about each school.
Focusing on our original question, how do schools with and without SBHCs compare across the percentages of students with high needs? In the chart below, we compare the average percentages of schools with and without SBHCs in the categories of students with disabilities, English learners, students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, and a combination of the three.
This visualization helps show overall, the schools with SBHCs tend to have more students in these categories, with an especially stark difference in students qualifying for free/reduced lunch, and English learners.
Explore the interactive chart for the comparison across different categories.
For our project, we focused specifically on public schools, as they represent the vast majority of schools with SBHCs in Connecticut. This chart clearly shows that public schools make up the overwhelming majority of sites with School-Based Health Centers (SBHCs), accounting for nearly 86% of all participating schools. By highlighting this concentration, the chart underscores where SBHC investments, outreach, and support efforts will have the greatest impact. It also helps partners understand the smaller, but still important, roles played by technical schools, charter schools, and other specialized education providers. With this perspective, community partners can align resources more strategically, strengthen collaborations with the school types most engaged in delivering health services, and identify opportunities to expand SBHC access in underrepresented sectors.
Explore the interactive chart for the more specific distribution.
In some instances, schools mask the data reporting if the number of students is so few that it could expose students’ personal information or status. For that reason, it is helpful to look at the percentages of students with high needs aggregately, combining all categories of high-needs students. The table below lists every traditional public school alongside both its percentage of high-needs students and whether or not it has a SBHC.
The table helps identify where resources are allocated appropriately and where gaps may exist. We can also see whether or not there is a level of correlation between the level of needs and whether or not a school has a School-Based Health Center. When a school has an extremely high percentage of students with high-needs but no SBHC, this shows a possible equity concern. On the other hand, seeing schools with high percentages of high-needs students and SBHCs confirms that support is being implemented into the places that seem to need it most.
Additionally, the table supports community partners, policy makers, and school leaders by allowing them to easily search up a particular school and understand their data. This helps stakeholders easily identify patterns, prioritize locations for new SBHCs, and monitor whether or not high-needs students are receiving the services they require.
Explore the interactive chart to look at individual school data.
For much of our basic data about schools with SBHC, we were able to utilize the google sheet, detailing information about schools with SBHCs. The information was provided to us by the Connecticut Association of School Based Health Centers, and our instructor Jack Dougherty further finalized and cleaned up the data. The data sheet provides in-depth information about the health center services and basic school information for each school. We used the data sheet mostly to differentiate which schools do and do not have a school-based health center across different variables. We did so by adding the column “Has SBHC?”, and matched it to the sheet listing all public schools in Connecticut. To mark the schools that do not have a SBHC, we converted all fields with unidentifiable data to “no”.
Next, we found all public school names and their addresses via EdSight, the Connecticut data portal for all public districts, schools, and programs to later be able to visually portray them on a map. Even though there can be other schools that are publicly funded, for this project, we only used the “public schools” category of schools to have the most uniform information across the categories. Once we had the school addresses, we geocoded them via Geoapify, since the typical tool Geocoding by SmartMonkey had a daily limit of 500 coordinates, and the number of schools exceeded that.
Once we had all the public schools, we downloaded data regarding the number of students that have disabilities, are English learners, qualify for free or reduced lunch, and are high needs (a combination of the three categories). Since the downloaded data did not present the data by student group, but rather just listed all the data, we inserted a pivot table, then pasted the table by values only. We then calculated the percentage of students per category across all schools, and presented them in our Master sheet. Using the data from the master sheet, we created the interactive table in the section above to navigate the data about schools and their percentages of students with high needs, with whether or not they have a SBHC.
There were several issues we encountered in the process. First, we needed to figure out how to differentiate the schools with and without SBHCs. It was challenging to navigate the field with “N/A” data, so we sorted all schools that have a SBHC to the top, replaced the fields “N/A” with “no” and applied it to the rest of the column. Secondly, the data provided by EdSight needed for our categories combined schools with their codes; so, we had to spend some time cleaning the data sheets for all categories. Finally, geocoding took the most amount of time, since alternative tools and websites from SmartMonkey were designed to convert one address at a time; therefore, finding a website that allowed geocoding in bulk was challenging, but we eventually found it.
One uncertainty that is present in our data is that the government of Connecticut mandates that if the number of students in a particular category is below 5, the reported data needs to be masked. In addition, when downloading the files, google sheets saves the masked data as 0, which means that even when students in a particular category are present in the school, they will not be marked so. Another limitation is that not all public schools were listed in the available data about student groups; therefore, their information is missing as well.
Connecticut Association of School Based Health Centers. "CT SBHC updated 2025-11-11". Ed. Jack Dougherty. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wsycNjSOLnj9gZ7wepTs7jyuzS7PvquCZEUsugSmMJs/edit?gid=1923834798#gid=1923834798. Accessed November 12th, 2025.
EdSight. https://public-edsight.ct.gov/overview/find-schools/find-schools-export?language=en_US. Accessed 16 Nov., 2025.
EdSight. https://public-edsight.ct.gov/students/enrollment-dashboard/public-school-enrollment-export?language=en_US. Accessed 12 Nov., 2025.
We would like to thank our instructor Jack Dougherty and teaching assistant Nellie Conklin for providing us some of the sources for this project and guiding us through its different steps.