Panel told a dashboard is coming to measure progress on All In for Kansas Kids strategic plan

The Kansas Early Childhood Recommendations Panel received an update on a new strategic‑plan monitoring project that aims to aggregate existing data and partner stories into a single dashboard to measure progress on the All In for Kansas Kids strategic plan.
Chavis Lipgar Armstrong, a researcher with the KU Center for Public Partnerships and Research, outlined project goals to establish shared accountability across organizations and to move from siloed reporting to regular data sharing and interpretation. She explained the project will group organizations’ routinely shared data to create indicators tied to specific strategic plan actions and use those indicators to show system‑level progress.
The dashboard: The project team said it will use the MySidewalk platform, citing examples of other communities that use the platform to show progress on community health or strategic plans. The team plans to deploy a prototype to a select audience (including panel members) in the coming months and to make a wider dashboard available by the end of the year.
Why it matters: Presenters said a shared dashboard could help partners demonstrate how local projects and services drive progress on workforce development, family connections to services, and other strategic plan goals. The team is already collaborating with groups implementing the new Kansas school competencies for early childhood professionals and with the Kansas Children's Service League on a dataset tied to a 1‑800 children hotline to illustrate change over time.
Discussion vs. decisions: The briefing was informational; no formal policy decision or vote occurred. Panel members were asked to help identify organizations that could share data and to provide feedback on the dashboard prototype.
Next steps: The team will continue outreach to align partner data with strategic plan actions, assemble indicators, and circulate a prototype for panel feedback prior to wider publication later in the year.