This final report describes the activities and outcomes of a federally funded program that was designed to address the shortage of qualified early intervention personnel in rural areas of Kansas and adjacent states. Forty-seven early childhood special education (ECSE) students were supported with stipends during the three years of the project.…

This manual provides a guide for improving the coordination of education, health, and human services for at-risk children and families. The guide leads readers through a five-stage process of group collaboration. The milestones in and obstacles to the process are portrayed through vignettes and case studies that describe the personal experiences…

Research shows that home visitation programs targeted at the developmental needs of children can foster their well-being. The Enhanced Home Visiting Pilot Project, funded by the Head Start Bureau in 2004, supports the quality of care that kith and kin caregivers provide to infants and toddlers enrolled in home-based Early Head Start programs.…

There has been increased interest in the development and implementation of physical activity interventions designed to increase young people's physical activity participation in recent years. This is perhaps founded on concerns over youngsters' physical activity levels and the possible health consequences. School-based interventions are the most…

Project Even Start is an intergenerational literacy project that promotes adult literacy, trains parents to support the educational growth of their children, and prepares children for school. The program is designed to facilitate joint participation by parents and children. It includes home-based instruction and child care, and it is integrated…

During the 1994-95 program year, the staff of Even Start, a family literacy program in Lincoln (Nebraska), and an evaluator collaborated to create a low-stakes, small-scale portfolio assessment to collect information on program impact. The small scale of the evaluation offered opportunities to involve the staff in each step of the portfolio…

Many service systems have fundamentally reoriented services by creating infrastructures that link resources from many parts of the community. This paper reviews 50 comprehensive community-based initiatives and describes their costs, results, and methods of finance. The overview defines comprehensive community-based initiatives and outlines…

The five-year Georgia Head Start Quality Initiative was founded in 1994 to provide training and technical assistance (consisting of monthly group training sessions and individual on-site consultation) for Georgia Head Start administrators as they pursue National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) accreditation. This document…

This book brings together sources of material on poverty and family health and makes it accessible to health and welfare teams working with families with young children. It draws on a wide range of disciplines and uses both "hard" and "soft" data to provide facts and figures and first-hand accounts of how poverty affects family…

Literacy programs in the United States have taken either a preventive approach for children or a remediation approach for adults. A new approach, family literacy, involves both parents and children in literacy acquisition. The National Center for Family Literacy provides training and assistance to family literacy programs through a process called…

This paper reports on the findings of an evaluation of Project Giant Step, a program funded by New York City to provide comprehensive services to all 4-year-olds in the city, beginning with low-income children who are unserved by existing programs. Both the costs and effects of Project Giant Step are examined. Effects of the program on children…

Smart Start is North Carolina's partnership between state government and local leaders, service providers, and families to better serve children under 6 years and their families. This study examined characteristics of families participating in Smart Start, their child care arrangements and family activities, and their need for and use of community…

A family literacy program for increasing 3- to 5-year-old children's literacy skills by educating their Mexican American parents is evaluated. Project Family Literacy--Aprendiendo, Mejorando, Educando ("Learning, Improving, Educating") (Project FLAME) is a federally funded program addressing Hispanic Americans' academic failure,…

This document provides a historical framework for better understanding the emergence of community-based family support and education (CBFSE) programs, their place within the larger service delivery system, and their potential for meeting the needs of children and families living in poverty. The paper is organized into five sections. The first…

This study of family preservation projects was initiated in order to have a clearer understanding of the ways in which local agencies collaborate to help families maintain a nurturing home and avoid out-of-home placement for children, and how school-age children are helped to remain in their homes and communities. An attempt to identify projects…