The future of the country lies in the hands of the children. If the child doesn’t get the right start, he is 60% more likely to never go to college and 70% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. However, good quality of early learning education can change these statistics. The Childcare Quality & Early Learning Center for Research and Professional Development (CQEL) is the University of Washington’s effort to measure and improve the quality of early learning environments for children. CQEL is responsible for conducting, onsite evaluations of child care providers located throughout the state.

The process of rating early education sites was being executed using a complex and cumbersome Excel spreadsheet until Data Wanderers pitched in. The team transformed the IRC Database solution from Excel to a robust SQL relational database thereby catering the problem of data security, data losses, multi-user access and facilitates standard and adhoc reports to analyze the performance of various sites.