Education At-Risk Families Data collected from the Illinois Department of Public Health for 1992 through 1997. Parental Reading Data collected from the Quality of Life regional survey conducted during July 2000 by the Metro Chicago Information Center. Dropout Rates Data on dropouts were obtained from the Illinois State Board of Education. Data on Chicago public schools were from the University of Chicago's Consortium for School Research. Educational Attainment Data are provided by the U.S. Census Bureau and extracted from its annual March Supplement survey.
Data are for regional residents who have earned a post-secondary degree.
Limitations of the data include small sample sizes for ethnic categories, which may contribute to yearly fluctuations in the share of those attaining post-secondary degrees. Original graphs of regional land cover prepared from the same data. Totals for other years were determined based on amount of land acquired by each county's forest preserve or conservation district, the state park system, and the U.S. Forest Service. This measure includes undeveloped areas that are permanently protected through conservation easements or public ownership, such as county forest preserves, conservation districts, state parks and national forest land. Due to lack of information on the acquisition date of a 10-acre Lake County conservation easement, it was equally distributed for each of the 10 years from 1990 to 1999.