by J. Rafael RM & Noah Garcia
Last updated on 12/2/2025
for Data Visualization for Allwith Prof. Jack DoughertyTrinity College, Hartford CT, USA
Our resarch questions: How many SBHCs are located in each CT State Senate District? & In each legislative district, how many SBHCs receive state funding?
School Based Health Centers are a medical service located in or near schools that provide healthcare services to students in a clinic environment. They're designed to bridge the gap with healthcare access by bringing medical services directly to where students spend most of their day. This helps the students, who might need on-sight/immediate care, or the parents, who don’t have the time or money to bring their children to an outside clinic when something comes up. While SBHC’s have been around for over 20 years, there has not been a focus on collecting organized data to better this system. This has been the main reason growth has taken so long. These health centers were created to better the services in underserved communities but quickly grew to become a system for whole communities who have not seen dentists or physicians regularly. This study examines two research questions: first, how are SBHCs distributed among the 36 State Senate districts in Connecticut? Second, how is state funding for SBHCs allocated across the same legislative boundaries? Looking at the state senate district is important for a variety of reasons. Mainly, state senators influence how much money gets allocated and how it's distributed. Knowing who these people are and what their values are can help everyone have a better understanding of why the SBHC distribution is the way that it is now. Understanding how many of these centers exist in each district, and how many receive state funding, shows how political geography offers an important perspective for comprehending SBHC availability. Analyzing state spending trends shows whether public investment is in line with need and whether some districts gain increased political or legislative support. This political and geographic viewpoint is important because it highlights possible disparities in the healthcare access of Connecticut's most vulnerable students. Additionally, looking at which political parties have SBHC’s in their district can show their own views and give a clearer insight on the distribution of the health centers. The geographical regions used to make legislative choices are represented by state Senate districts. We can determine which CT senate districts have strong school-based healthcare infrastructure and which are underserved by mapping SBHCs to these legislative districts. Our study presents two major findings. First, we found that 56% of the schools in Connecticut have SBHC's, and they range from districts having no SBHC’s to some having over 50% of their schools having one. Second, we also discovered that the distribution of state funding is even more drastic, with many districts that have no state funding to one that has 100% of their SBHC’s funded. Why these are distributed the way they are is an important insight that can help get both SBHC’s in places they weren’t before, and making sure they are funded so they can provide the services they were meant to.
This first choropleth map and table shows what percent of each Senate district's total schools contain SBHC’s as well as the ratio of schools with SBHC’s and schools without SBHC’s. Our finding on this data is that when looking at the data in terms of political status (which can be found in the tool tips under the ratio and percent) we could not find any patterns.
The districts with the lowest percent of SBHC’s are districts 5 and 32 which both have 0 SBHC’s within them. This was very interesting to me because the average number of total schools in each district is roughly 34 schools. So when looking at the total schools of district 5 which had 27 total schools which is only 7 less than the average compared to district 32 which had 36 schools in its district and is over the average. We bring this up to say that among these two schools there are 63 schools among two districts that don’t have any SBHC’s between them. That being said we think it would be a great place to look at in the future when focusing on SBHC’s just because of the lack of them and hopefully if they see the good one can do in the community then it will expand outward to the rest of the district.
The districts with the highest percentages of SBHC’s are districts 13 and 25 with 19 out of 28 or 68% of schools having SBHC’s and 17 out of 30 or 57% of schools having SBHC’s respectively. Following these two districts 2 and 6 both have 56% of their schools having SBHC’s. What's interesting about districts 2 and 6 is that they house the Hartford and New Britain areas which to us (we are from Boston and New York) are seen as highly populated have a higher percent which is good but if you compare it to other areas like New London, New Haven and Stamford which fall in districts 20, 11 and 27 which fall anywhere between one to two steps below the top step. These three districts, while they are getting a lot of their schools filled with SBHC's, we think it would be helpful to try to push those areas since they have a lot of people into the 54% region.
The democratic party has 25 districts compared to the republican party which has 11 districts. Knowing this disparity we noticed that both parties have a district without any SBHC’s within it whatsoever, those districts being 5 and 32. When looking at the percentages the republican party has less then the democratic party but because of the size disparity between the two focusing on the republican districts could be fruitful but it is not as bad as we initially thought.
This second choropleth map and table shows what percent of SBHC’s in each district are DPH or state funded. One very important thing to note is that districts 5 and 32 have no data because as said in the previous section they don’t have any SBHC’s.
The districts with the highest percent of state funded SBHC’s are 16 and 22 with 100% of schools being funded by the state but they have a combined total of 3 SBHC’s between them. When looking at the highest percent with at least 10 SBHC’s (which is the average number of SBHC’s that receive state funding) districts 10 and 20 have 67% and 58% respectively. Both of these districts have 12 schools that are SBHC’s and district 10 has 8 state funded SBHC’s while district 20 has 7. Within the top 5 of total SBHC’s receiving state funding 2 of them have only 11% and the other 13. These are districts 2, 6, and 25. Since these districts have a lot of SBHC’s that means the need for them is very high so trying to find funding for these districts might be beneficial for keeping them open.
The districts with the lowest percentages of state funding are in a 9 way tie at 0%. Since 3 of the schools fall under average total number of SBHC’s at 10 SBHC’s we won’t list them but the other 6 Districts are 7, 19, 30, 31, 33, and 34. These districts had between 10 and 15 schools between them and all 6 of them have 0 SBHC’s within them. Since these districts have a large number of SBHC’s within them already we think it would be good to look to find state funding for these districts since 15 is the 6th highest total number of SBHC’s in all the districts.
When looking at how political status might affect the percent of SBHC’s that are state funded we came to a finding that when looking at the republican districts only 1 out of 11 or 9% of districts have over 33% SBHC’s that are state funded. In comparison to this in the democratic districts, 11 out of 25 or 44% SBHC’s have over 33% of the SBHC’s state that are funded. While there is a disparity between sizes we think that it still might be important to look at more republican districts when thinking about state funding.
This table is a synthesis of both of the maps above taking the data and combining it into one chart to compare easier. This table can be sorted by any of the above sections.
When combing through the data and comparing we found out when sorting by “% of SBHC” in descending order and you look over to “% of SBHC w DPH” we see that districts 25, 2 and 6 rank in the top 4 of % of SBHC and the bottom 3 of % of SBHC w DPH. When noticing this we sorted by the column of DPH and found that these three districts placed right around the average which was roughly 3.5. District 2 had 3 SBHC’s that are state funded and districts 6 and 25 had 2. Because we noticed that it's closer to the average we think that even though they fall in the top 4 in % of SBHC. To add on to this we also noticed that districts 2 and 6 house large groups of people being in Hartford and New Britain respectfully and since they have over 10 SBHC’s in each district Hartford harboring 25 in its borders the percent of SBHC’s should try to be raised more because this could potentially help keep other SBHC’s in its districts running.
To create the maps and tables we started out collecting data. At first we looked at and used the SBHC updated sheet by Jack and Allison as well as the CT Senate District Map by Jack to find what schools with SBHC’s are in what Senate District. After uploading the CT Senate District Map data and the SBHC data sheet, we were able to combine the data and find out which SBHC was in which district. After this we added the data to our own Google Sheet. When we were thinking about how we wanted to look at the data we thought about “what percent of SBHC’s are in each district.” In very similar fashion we took the data from the CT Ed Directory tab of the SBHC updated sheet and used mapshaper to overlay the CT Senate District map and the newly acquired data. We then took that data and added it to our main google sheet under the name CT Schools. Moving on to the creation of the first Map. First we went to the CT schools page to xlookup which schools have SBHC’s based on the SBHC’s tab. After we did that we made a pivot table using the CT schools and moved the data to the tab over called SBHC map data and cleaned it. After this we then made a column called % of SBHC and divided the number of SBHCs over the total number of schools. We then put that data in a datawrapper under a choropleth map because we were using percentages and thought it would be a good way to show the data. After making the map look pretty we finished the first one. The second Map was essentially the same steps but working in the SBHC tab to create a pivot table about DPH funding and then used the same steps to create a map the same way. Finally for the Table we thought of taking the data from the two maps to create a way to look at an overlay of the two. Since we can’t put the two maps over together we created a table to do the same. I took the data that was used to indicate how dark each senate district should be based on percentage and put it into the tab combined table data. Using that data we put it into a data wrapper and created a table.
“Resident Town Export.” CT.Gov EdSight, https://public-edsight.ct.gov/Overview/Resident-Town-Dashboard/Resident-Town-Export. Accessed 29 Nov. 2022.
Dougherty, Jack , and Alison MacDougall. “CT SBHC Updated 2025-11-11.” Google Docs, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wsycNjSOLnj9gZ7wepTs7jyuzS7PvquCZEUsugSmMJs/edit?gid=1923834798&usp=embed_facebook. Accessed 2 Dec. 2025.
CT Geodata portal . CT Senate Districts. href=https://geodata.ct.gov/datasets/21e112d662af4d1baca8dcede14f0f89_0/explore?location=41.494916,-72.628482,7.96. Accessed 2 Dec. 2025.