The OCA Resource-Equity Index is formed by converting seven indicators across the domains of Education, Employment and Neighborhood Factors and averaging these domains to give each census tract in Connecticut a “resource-equity score”.  The score is then divided into five buckets which correspond to the five different resource-equity levels.

To create the index, data was converted from municipal level to census tract level, if necessary, and arranged so that higher numbers corresponded to a higher resource-equity score (the inverse value was used for poverty rate and unemployment).  A z-score was then created for each of the seven variables.  Z-scores represent how far a census tract is from the average of all census tracts for each variable.

The z-scores were grouped into domains to equalize the impact of Educational, Employment and Neighborhood factors on the Resource-Equity Index. The Education Domain contains Median Household Income and School Performance. The Employment Domain contains Unemployment Rate and Job Access. The Neighborhood Domain contains Poverty Rate, Neighborhood Safety and Homeownership. The z-scores in each domain are averaged and the resulting domain scores are averaged to calculate the final index.

The final step was to assign a Resource-Equity Level to each census tract based on percentile. For example, Very High Resource tracts are those within the 20% of tracts with the highest opportunity score.  The table below details how each resource level corresponds to a percentile.

More details about each of the indicators and their data sources are below.

Education

• Median Income: This data is available by census tract from the American Community Survey (ACS), (https://data.census.gov/). The data used in the Resource-Equity Index is the 2024 five-year estimate, averaging data from 2020 to 2024, which was the most recent data available at the time of updating the index. 
• School Performance: The School Performance score was created using the Next Generation Accountability Index made by EdSight and the Connecticut State Department of Education (http://edsight.ct.gov/). The data used in the Resource-Equity Index is from the 2024-2025 school year.  Districts generally correspond with town boundaries, with the exception of regional school districts, which encompass multiple towns. For towns part of a regional school district, the regional school district scores are averaged with individual town districts to get the combined score.  Because education data is only available at the municipal and regional level, a town’s score is applied to all the census tracts in the town.  For example, the score applied to all census tracts in Hebron = (total points achieved for Hebron School District Score + total Regional School District 8 points ) / (total points possible for the Hebron School District Score + total points possible for Regional School District 8). In some cases, the Regional School District is the only public system that serves a town, and in such cases, that score is used.

Employment

• Unemployment: This data is available by census tract from the American Community Survey 2024 five-year estimates (https://data.census.gov/). Since lower unemployment indicates higher opportunity, the inverse of the unemployment rate is calculated for use in the index.
• Job Access: Job Access is a score of both the number of jobs available and the diversity of employment available to a census tract.  This data was obtained from the H+T index created by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (https://htaindex.cnt.org/about/).  The data was updated in 2025 and uses 2022 American Community Survey data.   

Neighborhood

• Homeownership / Tenure: This data is available by census tract from the American Community Survey.  The most recent data available at the time of updating the index is the 2024 five-year estimate (https://data.census.gov/). 
• Poverty Rate: The Resource-Equity Index uses the inverse of poverty rate (“percent above poverty”) in order to calculate the resource-equity score for each tract.  This data is available by census tract from the American Community Survey 2024 five-year estimates (https://data.census.gov/cedsci/).
• Perception of Safety: This data is available by census tract from DataHaven’s Community Wellbeing Survey (https://ctdatahaven.org/report/datahaven-community-wellbeing-survey/), and is modeled based on town-level responses and tract-level demographics from multiple survey waves between 2015 and 2025. Perception of Safety replaced the previous Crime Rate indicator.