HRSA/MCHB 2005 FEDERAL/STATE PARTNERSHIP MEETING

PUBLIC HEALTH ACROSS THE LIFESPAN

Financing Early Childhood Health Systems

PHYLLIS STUBBS-WYNN: Well, good morning again. I’m Phyllis Stubbs-Wynn from Maternal Child Health Bureau and it’s my pleasure to facilitate the next session on Financing Early Childhood Systems. Some of you may remember, and I hope all of you remember that approximately three years ago, the Maternal Child Health Bureau developed and disseminated its strategic plan for early childhood health, and in that plan we had two goals.

The first was to foster and support leadership, MCH leadership, in the development of cross-service systems for early childhood health, and the second was to support states in their efforts to work in partnership in the development of comprehensive early childhood systems. We were fortunate enough the following year to launch the State Early Childhood Comprehensive System’s Development Initiative, which in essence was the way of operationalizing our early childhood strategic plan.

So, three years now we’ve been working in concert with you at the state level in the development of this work. And over the time, particularly in the last two years, as you’ve done the planning phase of the early childhood comprehensive systems grants and are moving into implementation, it’s been our pleasure to support and to work along with you in this task which, as described earlier, is definitely a task of collaboration, of working with partners and working in ways where we break down the traditional silos that separated health from early care and education and from mental health and from all the other areas that need to be working together. So, the work that you do with these grants is extremely important and again, it’s not a short fix, as you know, it’s a long-term effort.

As of today, we currently are supporting 53 state early childhood comprehensive systems grants. Three of them are new with the last competition this year, 28 of them are continuing to develop their state early childhood systems plan and 22 have moved forward to implement that plan. We’re excited about all three phases, the implementation, those that are continuing to breakdown the barriers towards the development of their plan and those that are new on the block and rearing to get going. So, in today’s session we’re looking at one of the issues that all states have told us is something that definitely creates barriers to the work, and that is the financing of early childhood systems and how state MCH professionals work with their systems partners to accomplish this.

I’m very pleased this morning to introduce our speaker, who is Kay Johnson. For the past 20 years Kay has worked on child health policy as an advocate, a consultant and a researcher. Her expertise encompasses a wide range of maternal and child health topics such as perinatal, prenatal, preconception care and infant mortality reduction, childhood immunization, dental care, genetics, home visiting, early development, adolescent health and risk reduction and services for children with disabilities and other special needs. She has been actively involved in Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Policy development at the federal and state level since 1984 and has served as an advisor to many state and local health agencies.

Ms. Johnson is a research assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School. Her primary research project is a study of the past 20 years of policy developments in child health, supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.

Kay is also an independent consultant and President of the Johnson Group Consulting. Currently working as a consultant to the National Center for Children in Poverty, she is the director of Project Thrive, a public policy analysis and education initiative for infants and young children at the National Center for Children in Poverty. Funded through a cooperative agreement with the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, Project Thrive focuses on linking policies for child health, early care and learning and family support. Project Thrive was funded in July of this year and in doing so they became the new Infant and Early Childhood Policy Center at the Maternal Child Health Bureau and in doing this, we’re working with Kay as well as with Jane Knitzer and Leslie Davidson.

Kay previously worked as a senior research staff scientist at the George Washington University Center for Health Policy Research, as the National Policy Director for the March of Dimes and in senior health staff positions at the Children’s Defense Fund. She is past chair of the Maternal and Child Health section of the American Public Health Association and she holds a Masters in Public Health with concentration in Maternal and Child Health from the University of North Carolina as well as a Masters in Education from the state university of New York at Buffalo where she studied child development. Kay is also very modest and inappropriately so. When I asked her for her bio, she e-mailed me a one-pager, which at that, was modest, but she took the liberty of blacking out most of the things on the page so I’ve been having a little difficulty reading through the white out, but I chose to follow her wishes and not read everything, but I know you will join me in welcoming Kay this morning.