This book describes Boysville's 5-year effort to design, implement, and evaluate an agency-based computerized management information, program evaluation, and clinical decision-making system, BOMIS (Boysville Management Information System). The goal of BOMIS is the integration of the four intervention programs, through the collection, analysis,…

Early Head Start began with 68 programs in 1995 and today, almost 650 programs serve some 55,000 low-income families with infants and toddlers. This two-generation program provides high-quality child and family development services, a focus on staff development, and a commitment to community partnerships. A rigorous national evaluation, including…

The Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP) has been in operation in Oxford, England for 5 years, with the aim of raising educational attainment, especially in literacy, by an entire community of children from their birth. This book recounts how PEEP started and its operation over the 5 years, focusing on the impact of the program and the…

The development of community-based programs to support inexperienced parents through home visits by experienced mothers, who are in turned facilitated by child health and development professionals, has become an increasingly common approach in Europe and the United States. This edited volume presents proceedings from an invitational conference on…

This conference paper discusses the results of a study that investigated the validity of the Family-Centered Behavior Scale (FCBS) and its companion tool, the FCBS-Importance. On the FCBS, parents of children with special needs rate how often a professional with whom they work performs certain family-centered behaviors. On the FCBS-Importance,…

This kit is a tool for enabling communities to work together to motivate children and families to make food choices for healthy diets. Team Nutrition is the implementation tool for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's School Meals Initiative for Healthy Children. Its goal is to empower schools to serve healthy meals and motivate students to make…

Shifting to results-based accountability is a difficult stage in reforming family and children's services. Heretofore, these services have been more concerned with the number of clients seen or papers processed than in their clients' quality of life. This document should help communities find the data they need to measure qualitative outcomes. It…

Despite policymakers' increasing interest in how fathers and fathering affect the well-being of children, research into the roles of low-income fathers has not met the needs of policymakers, who could benefit from better understanding of the factors affecting fathers' continuing support of and engagement in relationships with their children. In an…

Sustainability is a critical issue for the vast array of community initiatives that promote healthy children, strong families, and safe communities. Noting that sustaining an initiative over time requires maintaining sufficient fiscal resources as well as a combination of nonfiscal resources from the initiative itself and the broader community,…

Dramatic increases in single parenthood and the number of employed mothers have led to the articulation of policies and programs designed to strengthen the family in Ireland. This report examines the experience of Community Mothers' Programme in Limerick City. Based on the assumption that the understanding, advice, and support of an experienced…

A study reports on the Nevada Even Start Family Literacy Program (NEST), which provides educational opportunities to parents and children as a family unit through core services such as adult, parenting, and early childhood education. Questions asked in the study were who the program serves, what services are received, how funding is allocated, how…

To assist state policymakers in using limited resources to enhance young children's readiness for school, this report examines the development and effectiveness of prekindergarten and parent support programs in the Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB's) 16-state region. States in the region are Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia,…

This book examines the history of supportive social services to examine ways in which those services have been helpful, and sometimes unhelpful, to poor families; the factors that have constrained service provision and reform; and what would make the service enterprise viable in the coming years. Discussed are formative influences on the…

This final report describes activities and accomplishments of a four-year federal grant providing technical assistance and training for service providers of children with deafblindness in Delaware. The project included annual orientation workshops for new staff, family learning weekends, and eight summer institute graduate courses jointly…

Draws on two studies of the impaired elderly (N=332) to address the potential impact of public payments to persons providing in-home care for the impaired elderly. Findings suggest family members are heavily involved in support for the elderly and institutionalization is most often the result of nonfinancial factors. (Author/JAC)