Children with Asthma
Data and Resources
Additional Info
Children with Asthma reports the rate of asthma in public school children collected through the school Health Assessment Record. Data are collected for school year ranges Fall 2006 - Spring 2009 and Fall 2009 - Spring 2012
Measure Type,Variable
Health
Pursuant to Connecticut General Statute (CGS) Section 10-206, the State of Connecticut Department of Public Health (DPH) Asthma Program has established a statewide School-based Asthma Surveillance System (SBASS) based on the school Health Assessment Record (HAR). CGS §10‐206 requires that public schools report to the DPH, on an annual basis,information on students with asthma. A student is considered as having asthma if he/she has a provider’s diagnosis of asthma indicated on the HAR, has a provider medication order for asthma medication on file, has an Asthma Action Plan (AAP) on file, shows symptoms of asthma, has a parental note on file indicating the child has asthma, or any other indications that the child is suffering from asthma. This information is only reported for students with asthma in grades requiring the HAR - prior to public school entrance (PreK or K for elementary schools); in grade 6 or 7 for middle schools; and in grade 9 or 10 for high schools. Some districts submit data for other grades in addition to these requirements. At the beginning of each school year, a reporting form developed by the State Department of Education and the DPH is distributed to individual school nurses through the school district nurse supervisors. These forms get submitted to DPH by September of the subsequent school year.
District/DRG
Rate;Number
Connecticut Department of Public Health
Chronic Disease
Values have been suppressed for districts where there are less than 30 students, or where the prevalence between years is too inconsistent or simply not reported.
Asthma rates were calculated by dividing the number of students with asthma by the total number of children enrolled in the required grades of the school district. However, for some school districts, it was still unclear which grades to include in the rates calculation because the grades specified by the school district nurse supervisors as requiring an HAR differed from the grades that were actually reported for students with asthma. For example, a school district may have indicated that grade 6 was the required grade for asthma data submission, and while some nurses within the school district submitted asthma data for grade 6, others may have submitted asthma data for grade 7 instead. In other instances, the school district may have indicated that both grades 6 and 7 were the required grades for asthma data submission, but only grade 6 asthma data was submitted. In these instances it was very difficult to decipher which grades in the school district should be used in the calculation of asthma rates. In light of these issues, the following steps were taken to calculate asthma rates for each school district - First, only public schools with enrollment data obtained from SDE were included in the rates calculation (98% of the reporting public schools met this criterion). Second, the grades with the highest number of students reported as having asthma at the elementary, middle, and high school level for each school were included for rate calculations. Specifically, for each school, the grade with the highest number of students with asthma in grade PK or K was selected for elementary school rates calculation. The grade with the highest number of students with asthma in grade 5, 6, or 7 was selected for middle school rate calculations (some school districts reported grade 5). The grade with the highest number of students with asthma in grade 9, 10, or 11 was selected for high school rate calculations. This methodology ensured that the appropriate grades for each school are used in rate calculations. For some schools that reported multiple grades for each school level of entry, it was hypothesized that the grades with the highest number of students reported as having asthma represented the more complete and accurate reports than the other grades.
Asthma;Enrollment
2006-2009;2009-2012