Here's an overview of what's behind and what lies ahead for Census 2000 in the Virgin Islands.
Years ago, agency and department heads in Washington, D.C., held multiple meetings to determine what kinds of statistical information about the people of the United States would help them do a better job of planning programs, developing proposals and proposing budgets. Their conclusions, after input from local government officials, sociologists, statisticians and even a few dreamers, became the basis of the U.S. Census questionnaires used to collect data every 10 years.
About three years ago, personnel of the U.S. Census Bureau, which is under the Commerce Department, began putting together materials for the year 2000 census in the 50 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands — materials that are not all the same for every area.
They saw to the preparation and production of posters, hats, cups, T-shirts and handbooks — and literally tons of printed materials which they had earlier spent months writing and revising. They contracted for computers, software, custom record-keeping materials, complicated records registers, bright red bags and about a trillion pencils (still not enough).
Here in the Virgin Islands, computer maps were developed to make it possible to locate and record every structure in the territory in order to produce an up-to-date picture of what is left since the hurricanes of the last 11 years.
More than a year ago, across the nation, local budgets were developed and contracts were let with local agencies to carry out Census 2000. In the territory, the contract went to the University of the Virgin Islands as a result of a long working relationship between Census Bureau officials and UVI president Orville Kean and Frank Mills, director of the university's Eastern Caribbean Center Research Institute. Mills, who was in charge of the 1990 Census in the territory, and a federal on-site representative selected office sites, ordered furniture and began taking delivery of materials sent from Washington.
The hiring of help
Last December, "help wanted" ads began to appear in the local media seeking applicants for census staff positions. Public relations personnel began sending out informational materials to local schools, churches, community agencies and the news media. A "Be Counted" group of local leaders met to provide input into the process.
By January, offices opened for the St. Thomas/St. John district in Nisk Center and for the St. Croix district in the Wiesner Building in Sion Farm. People were in place in charge of publicity, administrative management, office managing and field operations. More ads appeared seeking candidates for supervisors, clerks, crew leaders and "enumerators" — the people who go around knocking on doors to collect the questionnaires and reach out to residents who have not been reached by mail, or have not responded.
Hundreds of people answered those ads and began the lengthy screening process for federal hiring — filling out applications, taking tests, sitting for interviews, having their references checked and getting an FBI security clearance. Many took tests for different positions. About 70 percent of the applicants were hired and promptly sworn to secrecy about the information they would be collecting or processing.
Then began an extensive training process. Crew leaders and enumerators underwent more than 40 hours of training and orientation to materials. It's no mean feat to find every housing site, record it on a map, obtain detailed information from the occupants, and see that it is documented fully in a form that can be scanned into computers programmed to make useful "big picture" information out of the individual data entries.
While the staff was being hired and trained, Washington was preparing to mail out the questionnaires. Across the country, the U.S. Postal Service developed master lists of all customers for use in the mailings. For St. Thomas, it came up with 43,000 names and addresses. That is the number of questionnaires that were stuffed into mailboxes and delivered to street addresses this past week. How many of those addresses are valid will eventually be learned.
The calls that count
Census personnel have meanwhile begun to visit residential "special places" — group homes and other dwellings that differ from the usual house or apartment. Here in the islands, for example, a number of individuals and families live aboard boats; so, the census office has enumerators visiting every marina and going out in dinghies to every mooring to count the boat people.
The official count also includes college students living in dormitories, inmates in prisons, residents of nursing homes, children in homes, otherwise homeless people in shelters and psychiatric wards, and those maintaining permanent residency at hotels and guest houses. Census staff members pre-visited a number of such places locally to determine whether they needed to be included in the count.
Regular enumerators are assigned to cover geographical areas presumed to house about a hundred persons. They use their own cars, work individually and carry assorted papers and recording materials around with them. As they visit the homes in their assigned area, they record on their maps where the structures are so there will be a total record of inhabited dwellings in the area when Census 2000 is done.
Most people should be able — if willing — to complete the questionnaire they received in the mail without help. Any head of household who does that simply hands the completed form to the enumerator when he or she comes calling sometime in the next couple of weeks. The enumerator will check it for completeness and understanding and, there being no problem, bid the householder a good day. Others will need some help, and still others may not have completed the survey by the time the enumerator arrives on their doorstep. In these cases, the census person will ask to sit for a bit, go over the questions with the resident and help to record the information.
Understandably, some people will be reluctant to let a stranger into their home. And, for their own reasons, some people may not want to be counted. Where resistence is encountered, the census office may send a second enumerator or seek to obtain the information by telephone. Census people plan to be persistent because the data being gathered is important to the community's quality of life and because the law requires all citizens to cooperate.
The counting phase may take several weeks, depending on the degree of cooperation within the community. As the counting proceeds, the census office prepares for the reviewing and processing of questionnaires that will complete the work in the local area.
What they do with the data
The enumerators will deliver all of the questionnaires they collect to the local census office. There, the forms will be checked by clerks for completeness, clarity and correctness and then filed in a large storage area. The address registers and accompanying maps also will be checked. As this is going on, enumerators will still be calling and re-calling on those who are reluctant or unwilling to cooperate in the census. This is a tedious process of checking and rechecking, verifying, re-visiting and phoning until the census personnel are sure they have as complete a record as possible.
Before the materials leave the islands, census office clerks will photocopy the data side of the questionnaires, but not the names. Kept here in the islands, this information will be available for use in determining what federal funds the territory is entitled to, what resources its people can count on, and what plans its government should be making. It will serve to verify how many of the addresses generated by the Postal Service are still valid and how many of the houses are still standing.
By the end of August, all of the Census 2000 paperwork will be sent to a pr
ocessing center on the U.S. mainland. There, the millions of pages of paper will be scanned into powerful computers with the software and memory to store and process the data — and, eventually, to answer the questions the Washington bureaucrats want answered. By this stage, names are non- existent. And, for the record: The individual entries are never shared with any other government agency –– not the Internal Revenue Service, not Customs and Immigration, not the FBI, and not your ex-wife.
The word from the Virgin Islands Census 2000 officials to all residents of the territory is this: "Do stand up and be counted. It will help us all!" And if you have questions, call 714-3696 on St. Thomas or 713-2000 on St. Croix.
Editor's note: Carol Lotz is an office operations supervisor for the St. Thomas-St. John census office.
