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Posted 7-19-01
CLEVELAND -- The Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University is embarking on a nearly $1.6 million evaluation of the Early Childhood Initiative (ECI), Cuyahoga County's ambitious program to address the needs of the county's young children and their families.
The venture significantly expands the center's staff and led to the opening of a satellite office in a recently acquired MSASS research annex.
The ECI represents a public-private investment of $40 million over three years in a broad range of support services revolving around three key objectives: effective parenting, healthy children, and quality child care.
The project will assess the extent to which these objectives are being met. The Poverty Center will collaborate with Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago and consultants from the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The ECI's programs and strategies include home visits to families of newborns and young children; childcare expansion and improvement, particularly for children with special needs; and expanded access to health insurance and health care for all children in poor and low-income working families.
While each program will be examined in its own right, the initiative is more than the sum of its parts, said Claudia Coulton, co-director of the Poverty Center and principal investigator of the evaluation.
"The Initiative is truly comprehensive in that its framers expect its impact to be felt beyond those actually participating in any of its programs -- to actually improve the community as a whole," said Coulton, the Lillian F. Harris Professor of Urban Research and Social Change. "It necessarily involves a significant investment from the community. We're working closely with the ECI partners to study its many components and make sure it's an effective investment."
The final results of the research, to be issued in September 2002, will inform the county commissioners' policy decisions regarding future services for families with infants and toddlers.
The Poverty Center has hired over a dozen full- and part-time staff members for the project, including a new senior research associate, Robert Fischer, who was the director of program evaluation for Atlanta's Families First agency before joining MSASS. Fischer holds a master's degree in public policy and a Ph.D. in policy development and program evaluation, both from Vanderbilt University.
Fischer and his staff have christened a new suite of offices on the second and third floor of the MSASS Research Annex at 11424 Bellflower Road, less than a block away from the center's MSASS headquarters.
Along with Coulton, the evaluation is being directed by three co-principal investigators: Sharon Milligan, MSASS associate professor and co-director of the Poverty Center; Sue Pearlmutter, MSASS assistant professor; and Deborah Daro, research associate at the Chicago University's Chapin Hall Center.