(CS3) Updates February:
Community Systems Statewide Supports (CS3)
The Partner Plan Act Collaboration Institute kicked off its inaugural cohort on January 17, 2019 at Malcolm X College in Chicago. The event marked the start of a year-long commitment to working with 10 collaborations from across the state on improving local early childhood systems. Please join us to welcome the inaugural cohort of communities accepted to the Partner Plan Act Collaboration Institute:
- Altgeld Riverdale Early Learning Coalition
- Champaign County Home Visitor Consortium
- DeKalb County Kindergarten Readiness Initiative
- Early Childhood Alliance (Skokie-Morton Grove)
- Early Childhood Coalition of Lake County
- Greater East St. Louis Early Learning Partnership
- Macon County Early Childhood Collaboration
- Palatine Early Learning Alliance
- Plano Area Alliance Supporting Student Success
- Southern Illinois Coalition for Children and Families
Did you miss the chance to apply this time around? No worries! We will open up an application process in April 2019 for the second PPACI cohort.
The Partner Plan Act website recently had a makeover. The website has tools for collaborations and those doing community-systems work in the early childhood field. We hope you will check it out!
Local Collaboration Spotlight
Leveraging Community Systems Infrastructure to Meet New Challenges: Southern Illinois Coalition for Children and Families
Southern Illinois Coalition for Children and Families (referred to as the Coalition), an early learning collaboration serving the 15 most southern counties, is incorporating a new focus on trauma and building resilience for young children and families. These issues were identified as top priorities for the 127 coalition and community members during their three-year agenda-setting meeting in April 2018. Leveraging the community's current infrastructure and relationships built to through previous efforts to address healthy child development, the Coalition hit the ground running and now has exciting progress to report in several key parts of their early childhood supports, from awareness/education to screening to treatment and intervention.
AWARENESS/EDUCATION
A community-wide awareness campaign (print and online) to educate parents and other stakeholders on trauma/resilience will be integrated in The More You Know, The Better They Grow initiative that promotes child development awareness. To train early childhood teachers, centers, and schools to incorporate a trauma-informed lens, the Coalition is working with the B-6 Resilient Southern Illinois initiative (part of Resilient Southern Illinois). This trauma-informed approach developed by the Illinois Teachers Association and the Partnership for Resilience, is already being implemented in southern Illinois K-12 schools.
SCREENING FOR CHILDREN
Screening to identify social-emotional development is another component of the Coalition's new initiative. Their revised FY19 goal is: "All Children in southern fifteen counties, aged birth to five, are screened for developmental and social/emotional delays." The Coalition estimates more than 20,000 children from birth through five live in the 15 counties that could be served.
Partnering with the Coalition's Screening Collaborative, first launched in Williamson County to coordinate developmental screening approach in 2015, the Coalition is now encouraging its members in all counties to use the ASQ-SE tool to screen for
social/emotional delays often caused by trauma, in addition to the ASQ. Partner agencies, including early learning programs and county health departments, enter their screening data for both the ASQ and ASQ-SE into the ASQ Online screening hub. Additionally, the Collaboration developed a way for partners who use different developmental screening tools to also create unique child profiles online and enter data. There are 6,788 unique child profiles in this screening hub-nearing the Coalition's new goal of 7,500 children receiving screening.
During this roll-out phase, the Screening Collaborative is learning about who is doing social-emotional screening, collecting baseline data, and recruiting new Screening Collaborative participants. They expect that several health systems will be joining the Collaborative, which will increase the "engagement points" for developmental and social/emotional screening dramatically. Only 20 percent of children from birth through five are enrolled in early learning programs that are mandated to screen children. Therefore, the participation of the medical community is critical to reaching more children in development screening.
TREATMENT AND INTERVENTION FOR CHILDREN
The Coalition is partnering with the Healthy Southern Illinois Delta Network to identify and share resources specifically for young children so that parents, agencies, and the community can access treatment resources.
Finally, the Coalition is developing an Early Childhood Mental Health Consortium, which will oversee all components of this new initiative to promote be trauma-informed and build resilience-from awareness through treatment. This consortium will also serve as a platform for developing a community of practice for early childhood mental health practitioners.
Congratulations to the Southern Illinois Coalition for Children and Families for a successful launch of this new trauma/resilience initiative. Their current successes demonstrate the power of leveraging previous investments in community systems building to respond to the evolving needs of the community. We make the road by walking!
Thank you to Lori Longueville, CCRR/Southern Illinois Coalition for Children and Families, for contributing to this highlight. For more information, please contact her at: lorilongueville@jalc.edu
If your collaboration has a highlight that you would like us to recognize, please send an email to partnerplanact@actforchildren.org.
Resources
Miseducation
Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built the interactive database "Miseducation" to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. You can look up more than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 districts to see how they compare with their counterparts. You can use this to get a closer look at the status of the schools in your community and use the information as a starting point for discussions with stakeholders in your community around how to support all children to succeed.
Scroll down on the home page to look for and click on Illinois in the table. This will take you to a page to show you the data on students, teachers and resources, and discipline. At the top of the page you can look up specific schools and see how they compare to their district and the state.
If you look at an individual school's composition, you can compare to the out-of-school suspension composition and see if there is any disproportionality such as in the image below.
Some questions to consider when examining this data include:
- How does each of the statistics for the individual school compare with the district and state?
- How well does the racial breakdown of the school composition match that of the out-of-school suspension composition? Is there any disproportionality? If yes, why might that be?
- Are there more school social workers, psychologists, and school counselors or more security guards and law enforcement officers?
Find out more at https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation/.
Upcoming Trainings
Engaging Families in Early Childhood Community Collaborations
This training will help participants identify strategies to reach priority populations, empower parents, and sustain a welcoming environment for families.
The Community Systems Statewide Supports (CS3) program has two of these trainings scheduled:
- Southern Illinois (April 9, 2019)
- Bloomington at the Partner Plan Act Conference (June 11, 2019)
Registration will be available soon.
B-3 Birth to Third Grade Continuity Community of Practice
Preschool Expansion and Preschool For All Expansion (PFAE) programs are invited to gather on Tuesday, February 26, 2019, for a Birth-to-Third Grade (B-3) networking event. The B-3 Continuity Project is hosting this event in Normal, IL. Preschool administrators and program's family support specialist are encouraged to attend this event together. More information here.
Partner Plan Act Conference
Please save the date for this year's Partner Plan Act Conference! It is scheduled for June 11, 2019 and will take place in Bloomington, Illinois. This annual conference brings early childhood system stakeholders to learn, network, and deepen their community systems knowledge and skills.
For the first time, the 2019 Partner Plan Act Conference will have a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process for selecting presenters and content. Presenting at the Partner Plan Act Conference provides an opportunity to build your professional network and learn, reflect, and engage with colleagues. We hope you will consider presenting! Please find details for the RFP here.
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