CMCA celebrates success

If you haven't seen our rotating story about Charita Henderson, check it out now! Charita was CMCA's Head Start Parent of the Year then moved on to be Missouri's parent of the year and the Region 7 (Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska) parent of the year. A couple of weeks ago she found out she is the 1st runner up national parent of the year. She has been heavily involved in the CMCA Head Start program and we are all so proud of her accomplishments and thankful for what she has brought to CMCA. Head Start and all of our programs have great success stories about individuals and families that have overcome barriers to achieve self-reliance and Charita is a great representative of all of those successes.

Health Care Institute

CMCA submitted a Head Start Innovation and Improvement grant earlier this year to coordinate nationwide implementation of UCLA’s Health Care Institute. Last week we were notified that we have been awarded the grant. The grant is for just over $1 million over three years and we will focus primarily on Missouri for the first year, then east of the Mississippi and West of the Mississippi. Essentially this is a train the trainer model designed to increase the capacity of Head Start families to understand and address their health care needs and ultimately reduce strain on the Medicaid system. I think this fits nicely with the interests of many of our partners including Parents As Teachers, Mo HealthNet, and the Missouri Department of Social Services. I think there will be further-reaching opportunities beyond Head Start families as we get our grant into full gear. We will be recruiting Missouri Head Start programs to participate over the next few months. This grant will be heavily evaluated and I expect to show great outcomes over the next few years. This is a coup for Missouri and we intend to spread the benefit of this opportunity as far and wide as possible. While I tend to think social service interventions generally address the symptom rather than the cause, the HCI approach, like our Circles approach, Step Up to Leadership, and Family Development Credential, is designed to empower individuals and give them the tools to address their own needs and goals.

From the grant narrative:

“We understand the benefit of bringing low-literacy healthcare training to Missouri families. Using the low-literacy materials and methodologies that have been developed by the HCI at UCLA, families will become stronger advocates for the healthcare needs of their children and will also be able to better provide for the basic healthcare needs of their children. A healthy child has more opportunity to succeed in school and in life and healthier families mean healthier communities.”

Healthy Marriage Initiative

Three words that have historically stricken fear into the hearts of liberals fearing right-wing "family-values" conspiracies: Healthy Marriage Initiative. Last fall, CMCA received a grant award of nearly $500,000 per year for the next five years as part of the Head Start Healthy Marriage Initiative. While I was ecstatic to receive that kind of funding, I was a little nervous about the implication that we might become a dating service, wedding chapel, or spiritual counselor . . . none of which fit with our new Strategic Commitments. As it turns out however, what we are really talking about is supporting healthy relationships to benefit children. I attended a meeting today to start forming a statewide healthy marriage (relationship) initiative in Missouri with Dr. David Schramm. Among the fascinating information we got, I learned that "intervention research demonstrates that parent-child relationship quality and child behaviors were improved more by "Couples Education" than by "Parent Education" (Cowan & Cowan). That certainly puts an interesting twist on our efforts to work with Parents As Teachers and our own Head Start home visiting model. One could go many different directions with research related to healthy relationships but we also heard about one I had never considered. We know that unhealthy relationships between the adults in a child's life can lead to negative effects like maltreatment, depression, unhealthy stress levels, physical illness, and economic hardship but it also effects a child's quality and quantity of sleep. Why does that matter? A child's sleep patterns is directly connected to their cognitive performance, academic achievement, physical health, body mass index, and psychological adjustment! This information blew my mind. Dr. Schramm, in his remarks, indicated that marital agression in a child's life is a factor in childhood obesity. That may seem like a stretch, but when you consider the list of effects we already knew about crises, violence, and aggression in the home (maltreatment, depression, unhealthy stress levels, physical illness, and economic hardship), these factors line up with causes of obesity. When the parents of children, married or not, do the right things for their kids, they are greatly enhancing that child's ability to be successful. I am proud that we are diving into this arena with our partners at the University of Missouri. Following are the benefits we expect for healthy relationships among the following groups:

Adults: lower stress levels, better healthy habits and practices, better mental health, better physical health, greater financial well-being.

Children: improved school performance, decreased emotional/behavioral problems, decreased substance abuse, criminal activity and risky sexual behavior.

Workplace: Better employees, lower absenteeism, greater work commitment, greater job stability, higher levels of productivity.

Families and Communities: more involved fathers, better parenting, financial stability, homeowners, volunteers in communities, fewer risky behaviors/criminality.

I suspect I have another blog posting or two on this subject. What are your thoughts?

Boonville Head Start Back in Action

Last night the Boonville City Council unanimously approved the plan to move Head Start into a new facility. This after more than a yearlong pursuit of new facilities. The old one deteriorated beyond repair after the December 2006 ice storm. After exploring more than 40 different properties the Head Start staff finally came back to me last summer to recommend the purchase of the Kemper Greens clubhouse. I visited the site and was impressed that we had found such a perfect location. It is the former clubhouse for the former Boonville golf course and is just the right size and shape to be perfect for a Head Start center. I remember traveling in August of last year and hiring a property lawyer over the phone and finalizing the contract prior to returning home. I thought we were ready to roll. Turns out however that I still had about five months of heartache in front of me. The golf course was purchased by a local partnership called GRM, LLC and they were really stepping up to help out the community by taking this vacant 52 acre property off the hands of investors that would have otherwise been sunk. They had this great idea to develop the land into about 13 acres of high end single family homes and the rest would be commercial, retail properties. As such, they had it rezoned as a mixed use zone. The first of its kind in Boonville. That's where CMCA comes in. Rather than tear down the clubhouse to build a pharmacy, we suggested, why not sell us the clubhouse and about 2 acres for our Head Start center. This looked good to the developers because it meant they'd have a sale on their hands to kick-start their development. Looked good to us because it is a great location and practically move-in ready. Being the first sale in a first-of-its-kind development has its drawbacks though. The City Council has been very cautious to proceed because they want to make sure this development is everything it was cracked up to be. Long story short, we had to work with GRM's engineer to redraw the site plan for the 2 acres, negotiate a transfer agreement that essentially transfers the responsibility of the developer regarding road development and infrastructure to us proportional to our portion of the total development, attend multiple Planning and Zoning meetings to defend our plan, and attend City Council hearings up to approval last night. On top of all of this, at least one Council member worried outloud about CMCA's ability to meet its obligations and GRM's capacity to hold up its end of the deal. In the end, I think the Council is more in tune with Head Start than they were before. In fact, several Council members asked about the need for more Head Start slots. I'm pretty sure this is finally going to work out. Andy Prevo is starting to work on some minor upgrades to the building and I'm hoping to get our Boonville families into that facility within a few weeks. In the meantime, Krescenz Hundley and the Head Start staff have proven their mettle by keeping those families involved using the home-based model and even setting up temporary quarters at First Baptist Church. Real leadership shines in a crises and Krescenz has outshined them all for the last year.

Head Start paranoia evolves

A few years ago, in my last job as Director of the Missouri Head Start State Collaboration Office, I reveled in the conspiracy theories surrounding Head Start, even co-founding a quasi-subversive listserve with some of my snarkier peers around the country. With them, we laughed (to ward off crying) at the standardized testing of four-year olds, a corrupt Head Start official assigned to root out corruption, marriage proponent trainers that made gender jokes during presentations, and schemes to "block grant" Head Start to the states without any protections against being stripped of it significant social service and parent components. All of this was done in relative isolation as it seemed no one with any power could put a stop to this. Maybe we were just paranoid. In this month's Mother Jones, they showed that it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you, with a brief expose of all these issues. More than $100 million was spent over four years for standardized testing that was so ill-begotten that it's data was never used for anything. "Shay Gurry, an education coordinator for St. Jerome's Head Start in Baltimore, remembers a kid who was asked over and over to pick out a picture of a knight; finally she erupted, 'there's no moon, so there's no night!' Another, asked how many books would be left if you had three and gave one to a friend, explained, 'I don't have any friends.' (Excerpted from Mother Jones, January + February 2008 [sorry, there's no link to this article]). The Head Start official was corrupt, doling out thousands of dollars in contracts to her family members and "dubious" reimbursements to herself. It's been a dark time for Head Start these last eight years but I'm afraid they're not quite over. While our new Congress is still getting its sea legs, it passed a Head Start Reauthorization bill that, while vastly improved over previous drafts from as many as three years ago, still contains some disconcerting concepts. I might go over some of those concepts in a future post. In the meantime, I am very pleased to know that CMCA's program can weather just about anything that comes our way. Mernell King, Early Childhood Director, and her team are exemplary. In addition to the fact that they completed a nearly flawless peer review last summer, they left a great impression on our agency independent auditor (who wrapped up his scrutiny of our agency just today). He was blown away by our accountability systems and even pointed out that Melissa Chambers, Assistant Director, was the "best ChildPlus manager" he'd ever seen. Mernell often says that if you stay focused on what's best for kids, you're going to have a good program. Interestingly, that's not as touchy-feely as it might sound. To the CMCA Head Start team the best interest of the kids also happens to mean maintaining strict accountability of the government funds we receive, squeezing every drop of quality out of those dollars, and holding themselves to the highest standards in all areas of program implementation. I couldn't be prouder to work with a group of people. The Head Start landscape continues to evolve and we're preparing for the future.


Today I'm over my Head Start conspiracy theories . . . and wonder who's behind the dismantling of the rest of the social service, education, and health sectors . . .