by Melissa Jesmin

Why is it important to solve this problem? Child Care centers are not being maintained and taken good care of which affects the growth and learning of children. It is important to solve this problem because a lot of parents/guardians are not able to stay with their children all the time. They have to rely on child care centers to take care of their children while they are busy with work. Parents/guardians should feel safe leaving their children at a child care center. Also, the environment that children are in has a huge impact on their growth.

American Progress Reports
New York Times
DOHMH Childcare Center Inspections

Child Care centers are not being maintained and taken good care of which affects the growth and learning of children. With the use of data science, I will bring awareness to this problem by putting together data on childcare center violations and by creating plots.

My hypothesis is that the critical violation rate at child care centers have been the same throughout the years and hasn’t improved. For this project I used python 3.9.6. The libraries I used are pandasql, matplotlib and pandas.

The following slide shows the graph for the Critical Violation Rate at Child Care Centers throughout the years by each borough in NYC. It shows all of the critical violation rates reported from December 2018 to December 2021 (with April-May 2020 as an exception). The critical violation rate is relatively consistent during 2018-2021, with there being more spikes in 2018.

In the next slide there is another graph which shows Critical Violation Rate at Child Care Centers in December, 2018. I made two graphs one for Critical Violation Rate in December, 2018 and another for November, 2021. I decided to compare the two graphs in order to see if the critical violation rate has changed from the oldest year in the data vs recent data. I used a scatter plot to show each critical violation rate in the days of that month.

According to my graphs, the critical violation rate has been relatively consistent throughout the years. My hypothesis is correct that there hasn’t been an improvement in the condition of child care centers. This is something to bring to light as there has been no positive changes being made to centers and the graphs evidently show that there needs to be more inspections and/or evaluations on the centers to ensure that the violation rate decreases so that more children stay safe at a place where they should be nurtured and cared for.