Mountain Youth offers ease of use navigating Healthy Kids Colorado survey results with local dashboard
Courtesy photo
The Healthy Kids Colorado Survey (HKCS) is an important tool for educators, nonprofit leaders, policymakers and community program providers to truly understand issues facing young people and exploring how we can work together to help them learn and thrive.
The survey invites youth to share their feelings and experiences anonymously around questions related to mental health, substance use and other behaviors. Each year, data from the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey offers local schools and youth organizations a peek into how middle and high school students are feeling, acting and viewing the world around them. The biennial survey was most recently administered to Eagle County students in the fall of 2021. While the survey is given to students across the state, local nonprofit Mountain Youth helps administer it locally, acting as a liaison between the state and the schools.
Mountain Youth coordinated the administration of the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey. Overall, the Eagle County survey had 1,346 middle school students participate and 1,961 high school students participate providing valuable insight about sixth-12th graders in the Eagle River Valley. This insight allows educators, nonprofit leaders, policymakers, and community program providers to keep a pulse on the behaviors, attitudes, and perceptions of young people in the community.
Now, Mountain Youth wants to place this data in the hands of the participants, parents and trusted adults, and other community partners. This data is used to steer programming and secure much-needed resources, helping local and statewide policy efforts by utilizing the identified strengths and barriers facing youth. HKCS data helps bring in millions of dollars annually for community partners to support identified needs.
Mountain Youth partnered with Eagle Valley Behavioral Health, an outreach of Vail Health, to introduce the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey Dashboard to the community in 2020. This user-friendly platform allows for a better understanding and breakdown of middle and high school youth behavioral data. The dashboard incorporates data from past years to recognize trends. Users of the dashboard can filter results by various demographics for 2017-2021 data. The dashboard is accessible in English and Spanish. It breaks down the information from different behavior areas by years and allows users to filter by grade, age, gender and ethnicity. There is also a YouTube video available, demonstrating how to easily navigate the survey results. For more information, visit MountainYouth.org/healthykidscoloradosurvey.
