By Eric Burden | January 11, 2018
During 2017, the state of Mississippi entered a period governed by a court order known as the Stipulated Third Remedial Order, or STRO, pursuant to the ongoing Olivia Y lawsuit. This order included language compelling the state of Mississippi to establish baselines, in partnership with an independent consulting agency, with regards to caseworker contacts with foster children, maltreatment in care occurrence, permanency outcomes for foster children, and statistics related to adoption of foster children. I was tasked with utilizing data contained within the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services database to develop reporting to meet the requirement of establishing baseline data for these measures. Reports were developed using Rstudio/Rmarkdown tooling, which allowed for the creation of PDF and HTML reports containing both narrative text and numeric/graphical data in a thoroughly repeatable fashion. One of the advantages of this process is the ability to integrate both SQL queries and analysis/visualization using powerful R libraries in a single packaged document. Reports were developed in partnership with and accepted by the independent consulting agency retained by the court. A redacted version of the Maltreatment in Care report is included below for reference: