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Project Description:
Governor George V. Voinovich and the Ohio legislature have made a strong commitment to families and young children. With the creation of the Ohio Family and Children First Initiative (OFCF) in 1992, the state began a fundamental restructuring of its education, health, and social services system; the goal of the restructuring was to ensure that all of Ohio's young children start school ready to learn.
A cornerstone of this restructuring is the creation of county-level OFCF Councils, whose work informs the state's financing, organization, and delivery of children's services. Most of Ohio's eighty-eight counties have established councils, and thirty have received special state and federal funding to implement a new program, Ohio Early Start, that seeks to support families with children under age three who are at risk of abuse, neglect, or developmental delay. The councils coordinate many other early childhood programs, such as family support centers and the state's expansion of Head Start to meet the needs of all eligible three- and four-year-olds. The OFCF Councils have proven to be an innovative statewide public-private partnership program. Help Me Grow is an example of a statewide public education initiative financed by a public-private partnership which provides information and assistance to all new parents through a telephone hotline service, parenting guidebooks, and incentives to use preventive health care.
Ohio's Starting Points project will create five regional technical assistance teams that will use the new Ohio Early Start initiative to further integrate various early childhood programs and funding. Each Starting Points team will serve as a clearinghouse of information about program design and services integration, effective professional training models, methods of financing programs, and quality review techniques. Each team will serve as a liaison between the state departments and local county councils of OFCF. Parent involvement coordinators will be part of each team. They will serve as part of the technical assistance teams to ensure that parent needs are being met and that their expertise is used well in designing new programs or services.
The project will also conduct an evaluation of the Ohio Early Start and related policy innovations. An evaluation steering committee--consisting of parents, state and local child-serving agency representatives, faculty from Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati, and other program and policy experts--will be responsible for suggesting the evaluations to be conducted, overseeing the evaluation design, and making policy recommendations based on the findings.
Ohio's Starting Points project is managed by the Ohio Department of Health and OFCF through the governor's office. The state provides matching funds.
Major Program Components:
Contact:
Linda McCart
Executive Director
Ohio Family and Children First Initiative
Office of the Governor
77 South High Street
30th Floor
Columbus, OH 43215
Tel: 614/752-4044, Fax: 614/728-9441
E-mail: mccarl@odhs.state.oh.us">
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