AMCHP 2006 ANNUAL CONFERENCE
EARLY CHILDHOOD: BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR LIFELONG HEALTH
March 4-8, 2006
LORRAINE BROWN: I will also be just quickly giving you an overview of the early childhood comprehensive systems grants to just bring everyone up to speed to make sure by now at the end of this second day of the conference you should kind of know a little bit more about ECCS after all the discussions after the second day of the conference, you should kind of know a little bit more about ECCS after all the discussions you've probably heard in intertwined in many people's conversations. So there's lots of work being done around the ECCS grant.
I have the project officer for Region I and Region III and my name is Lorraine Brown, and I work for the Maternal Child Health Bureau, and I also have been the project officer for Healthy Child Care America and still remain an advocate in support of the Healthy Child Care America work going on in states and the national support of the NTI/NRC and AAP and NRC, alphabet soup for lunch. But those are the cooperative agreements that helped support the Healthy Child Care America.
Basically just so that you know that the strategic plan for early childhood for Maternal Child Health has two goals. One of the goals is to provide leadership in the development of cross system integration partnerships in support of children and early childhood to enhance their ability to enter school healthy and ready to learn. And I'm sure we've heard that over and over again. That's the main premise behind the ECCS grants.
We also do that in the second goal by supporting states and communities in their efforts to build those childhood service systems by addressing five critical components. Access to medical home. Social emotional development, early care and education, parent education and family support. And there are handouts on your table. So you should have these notes right there in front of you.
The basic purpose of ECCS is to support states to plan and the planning process has basically been going on for the last two years. And ultimately develop an implementation plan that collaborates partnership that supports families and communities as they help children become healthy and ready to learn at school entry.
The ECCS grants are $100,000 for planning. We've had two plus years for some states to do planning. It's limited to the 59 ‑‑ to 59 ‑‑ to 59 grantees in states jurisdictions and Title V agencies. And we currently have 53 grantees. At this particular moment we have 23 who are implementing, 27 who are planning, and three brand new planning grants. We have our continuation application will be coming forth hopefully in the next two months where grantees will be continuing to submit for either continuation or implementation.
We have many states who are now ready with their plans who should be probably submitting their plan with their continuation application or many of them have stated they should be ready for implementation by September. So we will probably see a big emergence of many states who are now at the point of implementation and that's really exciting.
With the healthy ‑‑ with the early childhood comprehensive systems grants, one of the components of the under early care in education, as you know we've had Healthy Child Care America that we funded. We no longer are funding particular state grantees, but we are supporting on a national level. And in the final year, which ended in January of this year, Healthy Child Care America actually was last year, one of the things that Healthy Child Care America was charged with was sustaining the objectives of Healthy Child Care America. So within all the work of ECCS there's still the premise that states will promote participation in medical home and access to health insurance for all children, and of course that's one of the ECCS critical components.
The addressing the social emotional needs, integrating child healthcare consultants systems and partners into the program. That's also an accomplishment that many states find challenging and many states are also final finding innovative ways of providing that.
We have the National Support Center for Child Healthcare Consultants contract that was awarded last year in the summer that have begun developing a database of child care healthcare consultants and a registry of what the child care healthcare consultant network looks like throughout the country. And next year their charge will be to look at what are those models that have been developed for developing child healthcare consultants and to support the efforts of states by providing technical assistance to increase those numbers. And we know we've heard from states that there's no dollars to go with it, but there are some strategies that can be used in knowing that it's become a method of accreditation that NAYC has included in their updated requirements. It's something that states are really looking to figure out how is that going to happen.
Another area is we've accepted child care standards and other early care and education system projects into the program and partnering with family support and education efforts and this year we're putting a lot of emphasis on the partnering with family support and efforts. Many states have seem to be able to, early care in education, a lot of work was built off the Healthy Child Care America.
The social and emotional part even though there are not a lot of providers but there's a lot of effort and work being put into that area. The medical home, of course, is ongoing from Healthy Child Care America and it seems like a lot of struggle for some states is really figuring out how to provide that family support and the parent education effort. So that's where we're looking to try to support states at this particular time.
You have my contact information, if you would like to have more information. Also on the handout you were providing about the overview of the early childhood comprehensive systems grants, you have on the back page the states and who the project officers are that work with each of those states. So if you have more information required, that's how you can get in touch with us.
At this point we will have Sally who will come and talk to us about what is happening in Vermont.