Under the Smart Start program, 19 of North Carolina's Appalachian counties have qualified for competitive state funding to improve community services to young children and their families. Programs tailored to local needs provide subsidized child care to children of working parents, preventive health screenings, literacy and high school equivalency…

Despite expansions in children's health insurance programs, rates of uninsurance in California continue to be high. Noting that absenteeism due to poor health is associated with school failure and asserting that schools offer an established framework on which to build a coordinated approach to enrolling children in health insurance programs, this…

This document reports the proceedings of a summit to assess the adequacy of the U.S. effort to prevent mental retardation and related disabilities and to chart the course for future strategies to reduce the incidence and ameliorate the effects of these disabilities, particularly when caused by socioeconomic conditions. The document contains…

Recognizing that unhealthy children cannot learn and that an uneducated child will become a drain on society, this report describes the efforts of the National Health and Education Consortium (NHEC) to promote collaboration among the health and education professions to improve the health of children. The report describes the creation and operation…

This report presents two discussions of conceptual and infrastructure issues that state mental health systems serving children with emotional disturbances must consider to make an effective transition towards a managed care organization of services under Medicaid. The first discussion, "Clinical Experiences in Managed Care Implementation for…

As part of a series of reports designed to support the implementation of Proposition 10: The California Children and Families Act and to provide comprehensive and authoritative information on critical issues concerning young children and families in California, this report focuses on the role of public education and outreach and provides…

Conceived as a state-supported community-sponsored program for families, strengthened by business and service organization support, and designed to work with local educational, child care, and social service agencies, Washington State's Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP, pronounced e-cap) provides a "whole child"…

This report covers the risks to health, safety, and emotional well-being for infants and toddlers in child care settings, and examines opportunities for diminishing those risks and promoting healthy development. Part 1 examines the risks of poor caregiving practices, including the spread of infectious disease, the incidence of injury, and the…

To ensure that all young children enter school in good health, ready and able to learn, and are socially and emotionally well developed, states are challenged by the State Early Childhood Comprehensive System (SECCS) Initiative to assure that services are coordinated, integrated and well managed. States must not only plan the delivery of services,…

During the past three decades, there has been an increase in knowledge about early childhood development. Early experiences can function as either risk factors or protective factors for a child's future health and development. This has led to concern about how current health systems contribute to the quality of the earliest experiences of life.…

The federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) has launched a five-year initiative that will support state efforts to build comprehensive early childhood service systems. This initiative--the State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (SECCS) Initiative--provides planning and implementation grants to the state and territory Maternal and…

The purpose of this report is to provide the Center for Excellence (CfE) in Early Childhood Development with a set of recommendations regarding how to measure school readiness in Ventura County. This report defines school readiness according to the National Education Goals Panel (NEGP) which identified the following three important components of…

If early childhood systems are to be effective at the population level then they must be able to provide family-centered care to all the racial, ethnic and cultural groups that they serve. Despite major policy driven and technological advances in healthcare, health disparities across different races and ethnicities persist. For example, the infant…

This report outlines the national and state environmental context for the SECCS Initiative in supporting MCH strategic planning in early childhood systems building. This strategic context has implications for roles, relationships, and activities within a planning process and ultimately an implementation process. It summarizes the opportunities and…

This report is designed to support the planning and implementation of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (SECCS) Initiative. It addresses a set of principles that these agencies can use to advance their planning process, reach out to new partners, develop collaborative strategies, and build a…