The dashboard facilitates estimates of children served across programs and, in future iterations, may help identify cohort sizes for research/evaluation. It is not intended as the official count of record — agencies' own reports remain authoritative for that.

Two structural reasons: Counts are unduplicated per program — a child who dis-enrolled/re-enrolled is counted once. The dashboard uses a 12-month enrollment period (Sept 1–Aug 30), which may not align with your agency's school-year or fiscal-year reporting.

Some variance is expected. Discrepancies exceeding ±10% of an agency's own records warrant further investigation.

Dashboard metrics for percent of population could exceed 100% for a few reasons, including census denominator data not including all individuals that currently reside in the county. This might happen if the county has part-time residents, or if residents moved to the county after the population data was compiled.

"% of SC Population" uses ACS county-level population as the denominator. "% of All Programs Unduplicated" uses only children enrolled in a program — never total population — as the denominator.