Litmus Program Builds Community Stress Index

The Litmus program partnered with NAF, a national network of education, business, and community leaders who work together to ensure that high-school students are college, career, and future ready, to develop a tool that allows stakeholders to characterize the community-level challenges that public high schools face. For many years, these challenges were captured in the single proxy measure of participation in free or reduced-cost school-lunch programs; in concert with NAF, Litmus created the Community Stress Index, which aggregates rich open-source data in multiple domains to yield composite measures of stress at the school and school-district levels. The Index has been piloted this year and a Beta version will soon be available to the public for use by researchers, education leadership, and philanthropy, to guide programmatic investments.

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