The Nebraska Early Childhood Integrated Data System, or ECIDS (pronounced “e-kids”), is a collaborative effort to connect and integrate data across multiple agencies and organizations that provide early childhood services to Nebraska children and families. ECIDS has been in development since 2009, when a group of public and private stakeholders in the early childhood system created the Early Childhood Data Coalition (ECDC). The coalition recognized the need for quality data to make informed policy and programmatic decisions that will improve outcomes for Nebraska’s children. They were also keenly aware that the early childhood data ecosystem was fragmented, with data collected—and siloed—among different state agencies, organizations and private providers. A well-thought-out, integrated data system could address this challenge.
Seeing the opportunities to assess the impact of programs and services, enhance coordination across agencies and organizations and provide transparency and accountability in the use of public funds, the Early Childhood Interagency Coordinating Council (ECICC) formally recommended integration of early childhood data in 2014, and when Nebraska was awarded the federal Preschool Development Grant (PDG) planning award in 2019, the work began in earnest.
Current status of ECIDS
The good news is that Nebraska has made significant strides in ECIDS development over the past six years. The backbone technology to integrate early childhood data has been created within the Nebraska Department of Education (NDE). ECIDS uses a modern, cloud-based technology to link data across systems and protects privacy by honoring the data access rules from the source systems. ECIDS is ready to integrate our early childhood data.
Unfortunately, not all of the news is good. Despite dedicating funding to development of ECIDS through their receipt of the PDG and a significant amount of coordination, when it came time to finalize the data-sharing agreement in December 2024, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services (NDHHS) abruptly decided to end their collaboration in the project, citing lack of resources and legal questions around data sharing.
This is likely why ECIDS was not included in the Governor’s budget, however, this risks the progress made to date and could negatively impact future opportunities. First, we anticipate another round of PDG funding to become available soon, and there will be considerable emphasis on data integration. If Nebraska wants to remain competitive for this federal grant, we will need to demonstrate that we are working toward a fully functioning ECIDS.
Important to continue integrating data
Second, data integration is between more than just NDHHS and NDE, it’s important that we continue integrating data from all available sources, even if NDHHS is not ready to share data.
Lastly, participating in ECIDS is beneficial to NDHHS. The NDHHS data system does not track child-level outcomes, hampering the state’s ability to effectively measure long-term successes and challenges, and ultimately, accountability of state dollars. However, doing this is challenging because the current data system is difficult to update, is built to track activities instead of outcomes and would be nearly impossible to track any activities beyond a child’s participation in a service like the child care subsidy. ECIDS would allow NDHHS to do this without the costs of adding onto their current data system or attempting to follow-up with families after a service ends. For example, by linking subsidy data to education data we could see the impact of the subsidy program on third grade reading levels. This is one small example among many possibilities.
First Five Nebraska supports NDE’s commitment to early childhood education overall, and the specific inclusion of ECIDS in the agency’s budget request.
