Carolyn Smallwood, Executive Director of Way to Grow, described its work. In 1989 Way to Grow began as a program of the Minneapolis Youth Coordinating Board. Its founders envisioned an organization that would strive to eliminate the daily barriers affecting families so parents could prepare their children for success in kindergarten and life.
The agency is approaching its 20th anniversary, continuing its mission to prepare children for academic success by supporting families with culturally appropriate, community-based services for school readiness. Currently visiting 1,400 Minneapolis families, its Family Educators build trusting relationships with parents and their children and focus on ensuring that young children are physically, socially, emotionally, and cognitively ready to start kindergarten.
Way to Grow
http://www.mplswaytogrow.org/
Speakers: Carolyn Smallwood, Executive Director; Edna Pointer, Dream Tracks Specialist; Ronel Bloomgren, Program Director; and Megan McLaughlin, Program Director
Carolyn Smallwood
History: Way to Grow was started in 1989 on the premise that a lot of the kids who were in school were not prepared for kindergarten. So Don Fraser, United Way and Jim Ranier of Honeywell, got together with the Minneapolis Public Schools and other partners and created a program to provide intensive home visiting to connect families with basic needs, such as food, clothing and housing and other community supports.
Mission: Our mission and goal is to engage diverse parents and families and prepare kids for kindergarten. Our philosophy is that the parent is the primary educator.
Program size: In 2008 we served about 1,600 kids and 1,300 parents (unduplicated) with intensive home visiting. There were 8,600 home visits last year, about 3,000 referrals to agencies as well as 119 children who graduated from our program.
Four programs offered:
Assessment: We use Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDI), it includes measures such as: picture naming, letter sounds, and rhyming. (We had 158 4- and 5-year-olds assessed.)
Evolution: We have evolved as an organization. In 2005 we took on the goal of upgrading the educational process of our employees. That was big for Way to Grow. The program was started on the premise that we would hire employees from the neighborhood. I said we still can do that, but it doesn’t mean that they can’t be educated. Instead of hiring employees with a high school diploma or GED, we moved that up. We hire people with an Associates or a BA degree. We offer intensive training. We have three licensed teachers working for us. That started in 2006.
Niche: Our job at Way to Grow is primarily to strengthen parent education and to strengthen our community. One of our special niches, we are able to reach some of the most isolated families. We can get into those families’ homes.
Current Challenges: We are beginning to realize that we have a lot of families that have been around Way to Grow for a long time. A lot of our families have multiple children. I was surprised. We have a couple of families that have been around for 10 years. A family educator has worked with each and every one of those children. Maybe we need to disconnect some of these families. That is what we are working on. We have a waiting list. We are beginning to resolve that problem.
Edna Pointer
Dream Works: We work with pregnant and parenting moms over three years. We are in the first phase. We will focus on empowerment, academic and parenting education. Next year we will focus on resume writing, success on the job and work skills communication. In the third year we focus on community reciprocity, finding an organization where they can volunteer, gain skills and give back to the community.
Eligibility: You need to be 15-21. We want you to be highly motivated to complete your goals. It is not for teens with a lot of struggles. It is required that you go to school and try to get good grades, attend our biweekly groups, and meet with your family educator twice a month. If you are not working towards your educational and parenting goals, you probably will be discharged.
Services: We are meeting with the girls biweekly, offering some tutoring. All Way to Grow services are included in Dream Tracks. They have the family educator. They are getting the prenatal and parenting education. We will do some extended family groups. We will ask the family members that support these teens to gain knowledge with them, work with them and support them in completing these goals. It is not about us being the parent. It is about helping them do it on their own.
Empowerment training: It is a personal development course. We focus on five areas:
Growing Strong program: Our program starts with a healthy pregnancy. Some of the activities include Health Family Day Workshops, discussing parent health, discipline, and parenting skills. We also have prenatal support services. In the past, we have done culturally specific prenatal classes at North Point and the Division of Indian Works. We have offered them in Somali and Spanish. Right now we are working in partnership with Hennepin County Medical Center clinics at East Lake and the family medical clinic.
Megan McLaughlin
Basic needs: Family educators have knowledge about resources in the community. They take time to build relationships with agencies. They know the people who work at the clinics. They can get their clients through the system a little bit quicker. We also have agencies come into our training. (It used to be a full-day monthly, now it is a half-day.) Staff keeps getting information they can use and share with their families. They not only refer people, but they will call the family and the agency and make sure that family got connected. They try to build relationships.
Partnerships: We would not be able to do what we do without partnerships in the community. Examples include:
Community meetings: We used to do this community collaborative meeting where we got agencies together to give updates on their work. We stopped doing them, but we are going to start them up again. It will be at our office on April 28, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. We will provide a light lunch.
Ronel Bloomgren
Staff training: We used a strength-based model to see what the family already has as assets. There are core pieces of home visiting training: How to watch what is going on. Being aware of your surroundings and what is going on in the home. How you listen. How you engage families. How you hear what they said. We are teaching these core principals first. We don’t let staff go out to do joint visits until they get core foundation pieces in their training. … Staff goes on and visits agencies that are core family support: The school system, the county system, the legal system, and the health system. They have to know them to guide parents through them.
Early literacy training: Then we get into early literacy curriculum and education, SEEDS of early literacy, our in-home activities. We have a curriculum that includes books in a variety of languages. When kids turn 4 we want them to be learning as much English as possible. We are teaching with books, with what they have in their environment. We bring a book in and we leave one with the parents. We bring in fun things, “curriculum bags” with different themes. If I talk about trucks, I will be talking about the colors of trucks. We will talk about the shapes of the wheels on the truck. We will have a worksheet that talks about shapes and have children and parents identify those things. I will read a story to the child. With trucks, we work with the letter “T”. We sound out things with the letter T. We have fun while we are learning. Play is their work.
Prenatal education: We have a range of health topics we cover. We bring educational materials, videos and books. We encourage families to go to classes in their community.
School Choice: We get training on the school choice guide to take that to our families. We show them the book, their options, and let them make their own choice.
Question and Answer
(Multiple staff responded to questions)
Q: How does it work?
A: If you walk in the door, I would explain the program. I would give you a brochure. If you were interested, I would explain our goals: health education, school readiness, and connection to resources. If you were a teen I would talk to you about our Dream Tracks services. I would educate you about our services. If you were interested, I would fill out an intake form. You would be assigned to a family educator. You would be connected to someone who speaks your language. They would call you and set up a home visit. …
It could be the family educator calls up and asks May I help you? What services can I provide for you? The parent says, “I am looking for diapers for my kids. We don’t have food in the refrigerator.” Then we deal with that situation. Sometimes it is prior to going out and seeing the parent. But they have to be enrolled in the program.
Q: All done through a home visit? This is confusing to me. Are most things happening through a home visit?
A: Yes. …. And I want to point out that because of cultural and trust issues; these are families that normally would not go to agencies to seek services. That is why a trusted relationship with a home visitor is so important.
Q: How well do our children do in school when they go on?
A: To be honest, we don’t know yet. That is one of the things that we want to start tracking. We have a glimpse of that through MPS. They have been great partners, to allow us to be able to obtain some test scores. We are moving towards obtaining more information.
Q: How do you work with homeless families?
A: Yes, we deal with homeless families. Last year alone I had at least four homeless mothers sitting in my office. Right now we have two staff on site at the People Serving People shelter, connecting with families that are there. We then refer families to an educator and we try to do the ongoing home visiting services. The mobility issue has been a challenge for many agencies for many years. The population of mobile families and children has increased. Even for us to be able to keep up with those families, we have had maybe 40 percent success with families moving out of both shelters, PSP and Families Moving Forward. Others are gone. The shelter doesn’t know where they went.
Because we have less staff, because of the economy, we are trying to think of different ways to connect with families. Instead of that individual home visit, we are thinking of having a staff person go to PSP or Families Moving Forward and do an activity right on site with a group of families, as well as families in the neighborhood.
Q :I have a question about the scale of need versus what you can provide. What percentage are you meeting in the community?
A: Last time we looked, in 2007, there were about 6,000 children ages 0-5 in isolated families. We are serving about 1,600 of those kids, thus far. (Birrth-5, Minneapolis has approximately 29,000 children total.)
Q: When do you start testing the children and what assessment?
A: We test the 3-5 range. We use a tool called the Individual Growth and Development Indicators. We have a director of early education who was trained on the assessment process and trained a team in-house to do these assessments. In May of last year we worked with the school district to have their team provide an assessment, an end-of-the-year process. That turned out very well. Since 2006 we have watched the growth patterns of these children, for children 3-5 years old. We also do a basic on all of our children, which is a child development tool that covers social skills. It evaluates self-help skills, fine motor, gross motor, and language development skills. If there is an identified concern, we refer to 348-TOTS. At 3 years old we refer to MPS.
Q: Do you partner with any childcare centers in Minneapolis?
A: We work with a lot of early childhood programs, but because it is so individualized, the way that staff works with families, there has not been any group processing to say, “Can we get this group of families into child care centers?” It is based on their schedule and their need.
We have reviewed that process but with our limited resources and the individualized program we have, we had to figure out how to make that work (with child care centers).
Could we serve more families? Yes, with more resources we could serve more families. Just in the last few months, other agencies in the community have diminished resources and have been referring more families than they might not have before. And so we take that challenge and we look at it and we problem solve. We network with partners to say, “How can we look at these issues?” We have more families working. Can we make adjustments in our schedule so staff can meet with families on weekends or Saturday?
Comment (Maureen Siewert MPS): The Way to Grow staff is talented in getting children into programs. You have a couple of staff that are just barracudas about getting kids into the High 5 programs. They hand deliver them and say, “You have to make room for this child.” It makes all the difference in the world. Many children need more than a home visit a week. That is part of how you developed your preschool program. We know kids need longer time and quality early childhood programs. You do a wonderful job of making sure families get programming.
Q: You partner with the school and the county, it seems it would be helpful if there was a secure database so that everyone who deals with that family or child could input and share information. Any discussion on that?
A: It is our dream. All we can do is have an information system in house.
Comment: (Carol Miller, Hennepin County): My office interacts with schools and agencies serving older children. The piece that you speak about would be our dream. It comes up repeatedly, to know where a family has been referred. Has it been followed up on? Did they get in? Have they done this before? Not having to ask the same question 10 times. The challenge is data privacy. The laws on data privacy that govern each of the different pieces of service really prevent that happening.
Q: The privacy issue, why wouldn’t the consent of the participating family overcome the privacy issue?
A: Carol: It overcomes the issue of us to talking to one another. All those consents are time limited. So you can’t put it in a database that has indefinite access and availability.
Q: So we need a change in the law?
A: On the other hand, as a parent, do I want everything about me and my child in a database?
Q: Couldn’t we extend the time, to 5 or 6 years?
Comment: (Dave Heistad MPS) We hit a nerve with this. I think we need to think comprehensively about a database. Would it include private information about the problems going on in the family? We would just say the family has gone through this screening process and they were served by this agency, this agency, and this agency. And then we could evaluate the effectiveness of the services. We could look at the intensity of the services and see how much help parents really need to be effective with their children. The schools could be a lot more effective if they knew coming into kindergarten what had been provided. We have to look at it as a challenge that we could overcome. The state has a comprehensive data system for kindergarten to grade 12. We are now trying to bridge the gap so we can go all the way up through post secondary. We need to see how we can get that database. We assign the unique identifier. It could be at birth. Right now, we are talking about at age 3. Then you could track the services and I think it would be very helpful.
Q: There are so many organizations doing early childhood, HIPPY, Way to Grow, the schools, … is it working as a system or is it fragmented pieces?
A: I struggle with that with the staff. Way To Grow’s atmosphere is working. It is almost a controlled chaos. We have strong, good relationships with our partners. We make that work as far as our outreach is concerned. If you get past that, we don’t know. We deal with a lot of partners that we have to coordinate and organize and have a solid relationship with. That is the best I can answer. We don’t feel like it is fragmented. It is working easy to us, because we know the system. That is the difference. If you don’t know the system, it may appear fragmented, but it is working for us.
Q I am struck by how many communities around the state are trying to do something that in mission is related to Way to Grow. What they do is different, but the mission is to try to provide supports for families and get kids ready for school. Some of these initiatives are putting together the pieces of ECFE, a piece of preschool, full-time child care, Head Start, and all trying to connect families with what they need for housing, transportation, health care, etc. Funding is so fragmented. I know in childcare right now, there are 7,000 families on a waiting list across the state. That is at least 7,000 families or some number who can’t afford to get basic childcare, let alone high quality High 5 or whatever. There is a disconnect here somewhere. If I am working in a community but the basic access isn’t available, where do I send that parent? Five hours a week of preschool isn’t going to take care of the 40 hours a week I need to go to work? Connecting families to supports, connecting them to education and community education, all of those areas have big gaps. We can connect them, but they might not get what you need.
A: Exactly. Access is a huge problem.
Q: There is a disparity with kids of color, African American and Native American kids, placed outside the home. I wonder, you talk about ECFE. I am wondering if you have had contact with child protection to work with those families? Are the people who come to you less at risk?
A: You are right. Our organization is a preventive organization. We try to work with those families early on to prevent some of those situations as far as child protection. We have worked with some families in the child protection situation. And in the past we have had challenges, to be honest. We seem to be making some headway, especially in our teen program so they won’t move toward that system. Now whether or not we have had an impact? We think we have. Do we have the data as far as child protection? No we do not. We are aware of the problem.
http://www.mplswaytogrow.org/
Speakers: Carolyn Smallwood, Executive Director; Edna Pointer, Dream Tracks Specialist; Ronel Bloomgren, Program Director; and Megan McLaughlin, Program Director
Carolyn Smallwood
History: Way to Grow was started in 1989 on the premise that a lot of the kids who were in school were not prepared for kindergarten. So Don Fraser, United Way and Jim Ranier of Honeywell, got together with the Minneapolis Public Schools and other partners and created a program to provide intensive home visiting to connect families with basic needs, such as food, clothing and housing and other community supports.
Mission: Our mission and goal is to engage diverse parents and families and prepare kids for kindergarten. Our philosophy is that the parent is the primary educator.
Program size: In 2008 we served about 1,600 kids and 1,300 parents (unduplicated) with intensive home visiting. There were 8,600 home visits last year, about 3,000 referrals to agencies as well as 119 children who graduated from our program.
Four programs offered:
- Reach and Teach, our Early Childhood Development Program. We have two preschools, one north at Center for Families and one at Little Earth. We partner with ECFE and Minneapolis Public Schools.
- We have our Play, Learn and Grow groups, where the parents bring their child directly and receive educational material.
- Growing Strong, a health education program. If our children are not healthy, they cannot learn. We served about 280 pregnant women last year.
- Dream Tracks, a pilot program for teen moms. We deal with mothers and fathers with children between 0-6. We served 32 teen moms enrolled in Phase 1 of Dream Tracks. We partner with MPS.
Assessment: We use Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDI), it includes measures such as: picture naming, letter sounds, and rhyming. (We had 158 4- and 5-year-olds assessed.)
Evolution: We have evolved as an organization. In 2005 we took on the goal of upgrading the educational process of our employees. That was big for Way to Grow. The program was started on the premise that we would hire employees from the neighborhood. I said we still can do that, but it doesn’t mean that they can’t be educated. Instead of hiring employees with a high school diploma or GED, we moved that up. We hire people with an Associates or a BA degree. We offer intensive training. We have three licensed teachers working for us. That started in 2006.
Niche: Our job at Way to Grow is primarily to strengthen parent education and to strengthen our community. One of our special niches, we are able to reach some of the most isolated families. We can get into those families’ homes.
Current Challenges: We are beginning to realize that we have a lot of families that have been around Way to Grow for a long time. A lot of our families have multiple children. I was surprised. We have a couple of families that have been around for 10 years. A family educator has worked with each and every one of those children. Maybe we need to disconnect some of these families. That is what we are working on. We have a waiting list. We are beginning to resolve that problem.
Edna Pointer
Dream Works: We work with pregnant and parenting moms over three years. We are in the first phase. We will focus on empowerment, academic and parenting education. Next year we will focus on resume writing, success on the job and work skills communication. In the third year we focus on community reciprocity, finding an organization where they can volunteer, gain skills and give back to the community.
Eligibility: You need to be 15-21. We want you to be highly motivated to complete your goals. It is not for teens with a lot of struggles. It is required that you go to school and try to get good grades, attend our biweekly groups, and meet with your family educator twice a month. If you are not working towards your educational and parenting goals, you probably will be discharged.
Services: We are meeting with the girls biweekly, offering some tutoring. All Way to Grow services are included in Dream Tracks. They have the family educator. They are getting the prenatal and parenting education. We will do some extended family groups. We will ask the family members that support these teens to gain knowledge with them, work with them and support them in completing these goals. It is not about us being the parent. It is about helping them do it on their own.
Empowerment training: It is a personal development course. We focus on five areas:
- Responsibility. Taking full responsibility for all of your actions and the choices that you make.
- Sense of Self: They are struggling with knowing who they are. That is why some of them continue to have unplanned pregnancies. We are trying to help them build their self-esteem.
- Motivation: Being internally motivated to really want to complete their education and go onto post secondary.
- Education and skills: So you can provide for yourself and your family.
- Regulation of emotions.
Locations: We are doing empowerment training at Minneapolis South High School and Roosevelt Wellstone. We are just starting a relationship with Washburn High School.
Ronel BloomgrenGrowing Strong program: Our program starts with a healthy pregnancy. Some of the activities include Health Family Day Workshops, discussing parent health, discipline, and parenting skills. We also have prenatal support services. In the past, we have done culturally specific prenatal classes at North Point and the Division of Indian Works. We have offered them in Somali and Spanish. Right now we are working in partnership with Hennepin County Medical Center clinics at East Lake and the family medical clinic.
Megan McLaughlin
Basic needs: Family educators have knowledge about resources in the community. They take time to build relationships with agencies. They know the people who work at the clinics. They can get their clients through the system a little bit quicker. We also have agencies come into our training. (It used to be a full-day monthly, now it is a half-day.) Staff keeps getting information they can use and share with their families. They not only refer people, but they will call the family and the agency and make sure that family got connected. They try to build relationships.
Partnerships: We would not be able to do what we do without partnerships in the community. Examples include:
- Hennepin County. They fund us. They have connected us to The Bridging, where families can go and get furniture. Hennepin County will transport the furniture to the Way to Grow family. They provide two social workers that come in (they are doing it less frequently now) to consult with the staff. How do we deal with this family? We refer to 348-TOTS.
- Minneapolis Public Schools: For early childhood screening, Early Childhood Family Education and other early childhood programs.
- Cedar Riverside Towers: It is one of the places we have Play, Learn and Grow groups.
- WIC: We are on site there to recruit families. We see a lot of pregnant women there. We do a lot of work with them.
Community meetings: We used to do this community collaborative meeting where we got agencies together to give updates on their work. We stopped doing them, but we are going to start them up again. It will be at our office on April 28, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. We will provide a light lunch.
Ronel Bloomgren
Staff training: We used a strength-based model to see what the family already has as assets. There are core pieces of home visiting training: How to watch what is going on. Being aware of your surroundings and what is going on in the home. How you listen. How you engage families. How you hear what they said. We are teaching these core principals first. We don’t let staff go out to do joint visits until they get core foundation pieces in their training. … Staff goes on and visits agencies that are core family support: The school system, the county system, the legal system, and the health system. They have to know them to guide parents through them.
Early literacy training: Then we get into early literacy curriculum and education, SEEDS of early literacy, our in-home activities. We have a curriculum that includes books in a variety of languages. When kids turn 4 we want them to be learning as much English as possible. We are teaching with books, with what they have in their environment. We bring a book in and we leave one with the parents. We bring in fun things, “curriculum bags” with different themes. If I talk about trucks, I will be talking about the colors of trucks. We will talk about the shapes of the wheels on the truck. We will have a worksheet that talks about shapes and have children and parents identify those things. I will read a story to the child. With trucks, we work with the letter “T”. We sound out things with the letter T. We have fun while we are learning. Play is their work.
Prenatal education: We have a range of health topics we cover. We bring educational materials, videos and books. We encourage families to go to classes in their community.
School Choice: We get training on the school choice guide to take that to our families. We show them the book, their options, and let them make their own choice.
Question and Answer
(Multiple staff responded to questions)
Q: How does it work?
A: If you walk in the door, I would explain the program. I would give you a brochure. If you were interested, I would explain our goals: health education, school readiness, and connection to resources. If you were a teen I would talk to you about our Dream Tracks services. I would educate you about our services. If you were interested, I would fill out an intake form. You would be assigned to a family educator. You would be connected to someone who speaks your language. They would call you and set up a home visit. …
It could be the family educator calls up and asks May I help you? What services can I provide for you? The parent says, “I am looking for diapers for my kids. We don’t have food in the refrigerator.” Then we deal with that situation. Sometimes it is prior to going out and seeing the parent. But they have to be enrolled in the program.
Q: All done through a home visit? This is confusing to me. Are most things happening through a home visit?
A: Yes. …. And I want to point out that because of cultural and trust issues; these are families that normally would not go to agencies to seek services. That is why a trusted relationship with a home visitor is so important.
Q: How well do our children do in school when they go on?
A: To be honest, we don’t know yet. That is one of the things that we want to start tracking. We have a glimpse of that through MPS. They have been great partners, to allow us to be able to obtain some test scores. We are moving towards obtaining more information.
Q: How do you work with homeless families?
A: Yes, we deal with homeless families. Last year alone I had at least four homeless mothers sitting in my office. Right now we have two staff on site at the People Serving People shelter, connecting with families that are there. We then refer families to an educator and we try to do the ongoing home visiting services. The mobility issue has been a challenge for many agencies for many years. The population of mobile families and children has increased. Even for us to be able to keep up with those families, we have had maybe 40 percent success with families moving out of both shelters, PSP and Families Moving Forward. Others are gone. The shelter doesn’t know where they went.
Because we have less staff, because of the economy, we are trying to think of different ways to connect with families. Instead of that individual home visit, we are thinking of having a staff person go to PSP or Families Moving Forward and do an activity right on site with a group of families, as well as families in the neighborhood.
Q :I have a question about the scale of need versus what you can provide. What percentage are you meeting in the community?
A: Last time we looked, in 2007, there were about 6,000 children ages 0-5 in isolated families. We are serving about 1,600 of those kids, thus far. (Birrth-5, Minneapolis has approximately 29,000 children total.)
Q: When do you start testing the children and what assessment?
A: We test the 3-5 range. We use a tool called the Individual Growth and Development Indicators. We have a director of early education who was trained on the assessment process and trained a team in-house to do these assessments. In May of last year we worked with the school district to have their team provide an assessment, an end-of-the-year process. That turned out very well. Since 2006 we have watched the growth patterns of these children, for children 3-5 years old. We also do a basic on all of our children, which is a child development tool that covers social skills. It evaluates self-help skills, fine motor, gross motor, and language development skills. If there is an identified concern, we refer to 348-TOTS. At 3 years old we refer to MPS.
Q: Do you partner with any childcare centers in Minneapolis?
A: We work with a lot of early childhood programs, but because it is so individualized, the way that staff works with families, there has not been any group processing to say, “Can we get this group of families into child care centers?” It is based on their schedule and their need.
We have reviewed that process but with our limited resources and the individualized program we have, we had to figure out how to make that work (with child care centers).
Could we serve more families? Yes, with more resources we could serve more families. Just in the last few months, other agencies in the community have diminished resources and have been referring more families than they might not have before. And so we take that challenge and we look at it and we problem solve. We network with partners to say, “How can we look at these issues?” We have more families working. Can we make adjustments in our schedule so staff can meet with families on weekends or Saturday?
Comment (Maureen Siewert MPS): The Way to Grow staff is talented in getting children into programs. You have a couple of staff that are just barracudas about getting kids into the High 5 programs. They hand deliver them and say, “You have to make room for this child.” It makes all the difference in the world. Many children need more than a home visit a week. That is part of how you developed your preschool program. We know kids need longer time and quality early childhood programs. You do a wonderful job of making sure families get programming.
Q: You partner with the school and the county, it seems it would be helpful if there was a secure database so that everyone who deals with that family or child could input and share information. Any discussion on that?
A: It is our dream. All we can do is have an information system in house.
Comment: (Carol Miller, Hennepin County): My office interacts with schools and agencies serving older children. The piece that you speak about would be our dream. It comes up repeatedly, to know where a family has been referred. Has it been followed up on? Did they get in? Have they done this before? Not having to ask the same question 10 times. The challenge is data privacy. The laws on data privacy that govern each of the different pieces of service really prevent that happening.
Q: The privacy issue, why wouldn’t the consent of the participating family overcome the privacy issue?
A: Carol: It overcomes the issue of us to talking to one another. All those consents are time limited. So you can’t put it in a database that has indefinite access and availability.
Q: So we need a change in the law?
A: On the other hand, as a parent, do I want everything about me and my child in a database?
Q: Couldn’t we extend the time, to 5 or 6 years?
Comment: (Dave Heistad MPS) We hit a nerve with this. I think we need to think comprehensively about a database. Would it include private information about the problems going on in the family? We would just say the family has gone through this screening process and they were served by this agency, this agency, and this agency. And then we could evaluate the effectiveness of the services. We could look at the intensity of the services and see how much help parents really need to be effective with their children. The schools could be a lot more effective if they knew coming into kindergarten what had been provided. We have to look at it as a challenge that we could overcome. The state has a comprehensive data system for kindergarten to grade 12. We are now trying to bridge the gap so we can go all the way up through post secondary. We need to see how we can get that database. We assign the unique identifier. It could be at birth. Right now, we are talking about at age 3. Then you could track the services and I think it would be very helpful.
Q: There are so many organizations doing early childhood, HIPPY, Way to Grow, the schools, … is it working as a system or is it fragmented pieces?
A: I struggle with that with the staff. Way To Grow’s atmosphere is working. It is almost a controlled chaos. We have strong, good relationships with our partners. We make that work as far as our outreach is concerned. If you get past that, we don’t know. We deal with a lot of partners that we have to coordinate and organize and have a solid relationship with. That is the best I can answer. We don’t feel like it is fragmented. It is working easy to us, because we know the system. That is the difference. If you don’t know the system, it may appear fragmented, but it is working for us.
Q I am struck by how many communities around the state are trying to do something that in mission is related to Way to Grow. What they do is different, but the mission is to try to provide supports for families and get kids ready for school. Some of these initiatives are putting together the pieces of ECFE, a piece of preschool, full-time child care, Head Start, and all trying to connect families with what they need for housing, transportation, health care, etc. Funding is so fragmented. I know in childcare right now, there are 7,000 families on a waiting list across the state. That is at least 7,000 families or some number who can’t afford to get basic childcare, let alone high quality High 5 or whatever. There is a disconnect here somewhere. If I am working in a community but the basic access isn’t available, where do I send that parent? Five hours a week of preschool isn’t going to take care of the 40 hours a week I need to go to work? Connecting families to supports, connecting them to education and community education, all of those areas have big gaps. We can connect them, but they might not get what you need.
A: Exactly. Access is a huge problem.
Q: There is a disparity with kids of color, African American and Native American kids, placed outside the home. I wonder, you talk about ECFE. I am wondering if you have had contact with child protection to work with those families? Are the people who come to you less at risk?
A: You are right. Our organization is a preventive organization. We try to work with those families early on to prevent some of those situations as far as child protection. We have worked with some families in the child protection situation. And in the past we have had challenges, to be honest. We seem to be making some headway, especially in our teen program so they won’t move toward that system. Now whether or not we have had an impact? We think we have. Do we have the data as far as child protection? No we do not. We are aware of the problem.
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