Collecting census data from places like jails extra challenging

By Elise Purkapile

Courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau

“I said, ‘Hi,’ and showed her my badge. She smiled and shut the door,” Toledo said.

Going door to door for the U.S. Census, Lynette Toledo found knocking on a stranger’s door usually turns out okay, but sometimes the unexpected happens.

That’s what happened with one woman who Toledo suspects didn’t speak English.

“I said, ‘Hi,’ and showed her my badge. She smiled and shut the door,” Toledo said.

Census questionnaires are due back to the government now, and Toledo was part of the effort to make sure every mailbox received one. She was doing pre-census canvassing to alert people to the forms arrival when the woman shut the door on her.

That was last spring. Today, she is the Group Quarters Supervisor for the census in Minnesota, which means she is in charge of collecting census data from people living in groups in places like nursing homes, hospitals, jails, and hospices.

“Group Quarters is any facility that houses people who are usually unrelated,” Toledo said.

To make sure that everything gets done, she supervises 50-100 “crew leaders,” she said, who organize data collection in group-living situations. “Lynette trained them all,” said Gary Van Eyll, who manages the local census office.

The challenges she faces as a the group quarters supervisor have changed from people shutting the door on her to thinking about patient privacy concerns and counting people locked behind bars. At jails and prisons, security and safety are an issue, so instead of sending census workers inside those buildings, they train prison and jail staff to survey the jail and prison population.

Individual forms won’t be sent out to all group quarters, Toledo said. In some cases, census workers will go to a site on census day – April 1 – and collect the responses to census questions in person. That’s something that won’t happen at individual houses unless residents don’t send the form back in.

Sometimes if people don’t want to give out their private information for personal reasons, Lynette’s crew encourages them that the census is easy and it is important for the community.

To get this job, she had to take a basic skills test. This test consists of 28 questions about geography, math, and general knowledge. She was promoted to a supervisor position because she was talented, had previous canvassing skills, and because of ability to speak Spanish, Van Eyll said.

Like Toledo, every ten years – each year there is a census – new people are hired for all positions. Van Eyll is also new. The census basically starts fresh every time it’s done, he said.

Toledo, along with every census worker, has until December to get all the collected data compiled for states, which will use the data to figure out things like where schools are needed based on the number of children in the area, and if the state’s representatives in the House should go up or down if populations have changed.

Some people wonder how accurate the census is. Watching over 50 to 100 workers and making sure that they do everything right is somewhat stressful. Lynette says that if they work as a whole team and make sure that they are all doing their part; her job is a lot less stressful. She also feels that it is very important to get everything done because the census is important. “There is pressure, there is a time line,” she said, “but it is doable.”