Success By 6 & HMG

Beth Johns is an assistant vice president at United Way of Central Alabama and she leads the Success By 6 program. Take a look at what she has to say about her passion for young children and how she thinks Help Me Grow fits in Alabama.

Success By 6 is the umbrella for early childhood initiatives at United Way of Central Alabama covering 5 counties- Blount, St. Clair, Jefferson, Walker and Shelby. Since its inception, Success By 6 has worked with preschoolers in a variety of settings with our quality preschool initiative. One component of our work is developmental screening onsite and linking children to appropriate services in the home, community, school, and/or health system.

Before joining the team at Success By 6 as the part time Health and Developmental Specialist, I practiced in Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina as an occupational therapist. I personally saw the impact of late identification of behavioral or developmental issues on families who felt left behind by the system. This was an ongoing issue with the families I worked with and I was driven then and am now to link families to what they need and to assure children are identified and connected to services as early as possible.

For years, Success By 6  has provided child care provider training on child development, developmental screening, resources, and empowering the child care and early childhood professionals to trust their instincts based in experience. The Success By 6 team works with child care providers, families, and community service providers to identify children's developmental delays using Ages and Stages Questionnaire-3. The team then links them to preschool special education or community based services for further assessment and possible services.

Early identification is a priority at Success By 6 and we believe strongly that through Help Me Grow efforts in physician outreach, community outreach, data collection, and our centralized call center that assesses needs and connects resources, we will be able to reach MORE children and assure they have a great start in school and in life. We are thrilled to be the regional implementation site of Help Me Grow in Alabama and to help strengthen a system which enables children and families to be successful.

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Do you have a question for Beth? Leave it in the comments or visit http://www.uwca.org/successby6/index.htm to find out more.

Congratulations, Alabama Act Early Ambassador!

Congratulations to Anna McConnell, State Autism Coordinator and new Alabama Act Early Ambassador! Anna is with the Alabama Department of Mental Health and serves as a leader on the Help Me Grow Alabama state team. We are very proud of Anna and excited about the Learn the Signs, Act Early materials and information that she will gain.

The Act Early Ambassador program is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)  and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Maternal and Child Health Bureau.  The 15-month program allows Ambassadors to help promote the goals and objectives of Learn the Signs, Act Early (LTSAE), to improve early identification of autism and other developmental disabilities, to work closely with the LTSAE national program and Act Early Alabama state team, and to utilize and help promote the “Autism Case Training: A Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics Curriculum.”

This opportunity will make more resources available to further the progress that has already been made by the Act Early Team by continuing to strengthen and expand relationships with the medical community to improve developmental monitoring and to provide resources and training.  These activities are in line with the mission and charge of the Alabama Interagency Autism Coordinating Council (AIACC), which already participates in LTSAE initiatives.  Anna's ambassadorship will strengthen partnerships around the state, like Help Me Grow, as these initiatives continue to expand.

Families and Services: New Research

One of the major goals of Help Me Grow is to provide support and connections for young children when developmental concerns are identified.  Alabama’s Early Intervention System (AEIS) provides services to children birth to three who are eligible.  Alabama has one of the broadest eligibility definitions in the country – serving children with a 25% delay in any developmental area or a diagnosed condition likely to lead to delay.  Help Me Grow is designed for those who will not qualify for EI services but are identified as “at risk” of a delay.  Alabama’s EI system does not serve the “at risk” population, therefore there are children who need support and services but who do not quality for EI services in our state. 

There may be times when health care and early childhood professionals assess children and feel that they need services but do not qualify for AEIS OR a family decides they do not want EI services. EI is completely voluntary and a parent may choose not to participate even if a child is determined eligible. 

Recently a national research foundation, The Commonwealth Fund, implemented a study that revealed some staggering information about what hampers children that have “fallen through the cracks”. Five barriers the study found may surprise you. The barriers were identified based on interviews with parents of children who had been through an EI evaluation, parents of children who hadn't, and EI staff. The researchers also make recommendations for improving the referral process. Follow this link to see the barriers and recommendations.

Alabama HMG stakeholders continue to collaborate in an effort to identify all children who need help as early as possible and to coordinate with the services they need. Anyone concerned about a child's development can refer that child for an EI evaluation. If you'd like to know more about Alabama's Early Intervention System, click here.  To fill out the fax-back form to refer a child for EI services, download this PDF.

Did you know you could refer a child in your life for evaluation if you were concerned about his or her development? Find out more about developmental delays here and together, we can all make a difference for Alabama's children!

We're on (web)TV!

In our last post, we shared that we would be delivering a live Strengthening Families and Help Me Grow training on Alabama Public Health Training Network. In case you were unable to catch us last Thursday, here's the link to our webcast!

Just select the download for whichever media player your computer prefers. The presentation is an hour and a half. If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, here is an outline of the presentation:

2:57 - Gail Piggott, Executive Director of Alabama Partnership for Children (APC), provides overview of the discussion including a history of the APC and the Blueprint for Zero to Five
26:11 - Robin Mackey, Strengthening Families Coordinator and Research and Policy Analyst of APC, introduces Strengthening Families and explains the five protective factors
56:02 - Alycia Jeong, Smart Start Coordinator of APC, discusses Help Me Grow four major components and implementation in Central Alabama
1:17:00 - Alycia Jeong & Robin Mackey discuss Books, Balls, and Blocks event and its fit into Help Me Grow and Strengthening Families frameworks
1:21:08 - Gail Piggott concludes the training and answers questions

Please visit the ALPHTN site and watch our video!

Strengthening Families and Help Me Grow

Strengthening Families is a national framework that is being implemented in Alabama through the Alabama Partnership for Children (APC) with support from many agencies and partners.

Strengthening Families is a framework based upon five protective factors-

1. Parental Resilience: a family's ability to bounce back from setbacks

2. Social Connections: a family's network of resources and support

3. Knowledge of Parenting and Child Development: parent's confidence and preparedness as their child's first observer, teacher, and health care provider

4. Concrete Support in Times of Need: parent's know how to get help and who to turn to

5. Social and Emotional Competence of Children: children have needs met and are encouraged towards developmental success

Help Me Grow AL has an exciting opportunity with Strengthening Families offered by the Alabama Public Health Training Network. Strengthening Families and Help Me Grow: Tools You Can Use to Help Families is a satellite conference and live webcast scheduled for January 10th from 10-11:30am (CST). The webcast is open to the public, but you must go here to register. During the webcast you'll learn a lot more about the Alabama Partnership for Children, Strengthening Families in Alabama, and how Help Me Grow is connected.

You should also check out this short document if you're interested in understanding the national connection between Strengthening Families and Help Me Grow. To open the PDF directly, click here OR to go to the HMG National page where the PDF is available, click here.

HMG at EI Conference

Beth Johns and Gail Piggott presented at the 28^th Annual Alabama Early Intervention Conference in Mobile, Alabama on December 4th to a crowd of 50-60 attendees.

The attendees were educated on the Help Me Grow model, its components, current implementation, strategies for engagement for attendees and other partnerships, and materials from Help Me Grow, United Way of Central Alabama, and Alabama Partnership for Children.

The attendees were enthusiastic and asked excellent questions. In the audience were early intervention staff from all over state as well as Head Start/Early Head Start workers, pediatricians, occupational and physical therapists, speech language pathologists, parents/family members, preschool teachers, and personnel from all over the state. There was a lot of enthusiasm from attendees from Chilton County, Children’s of Alabama, Head Start, and Help Me Grow even gained a parent champion for work in Central Alabama.

Early Intervention is Alabama's statewide service that provides support for children 0-36 months of age and their families. To be eligible for services, a child must have a medical diagnosis that delays normal development or have a developmental delay that causes the child to not meet appropriate developmental milestones. Click here to find out more about AL Early Intervention and to refer a child for screening and evaluation.

A Tale of Two Children

Consider the differences between a child given the opportunity to succeed in life, and one who was not given such opportunities. Follow the link to read this powerful, short post shared by our partners at American Academy of Pediatrics and Reach Out and Read.

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A Tale of Two Children by Dr. Olson Huff

It was, according to the opening words of Charles Dickens’ famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities, “the best of times the worst of times.”

Although far removed from the French Revolution, the contrasting scenes those words evoke are very much reflected in the lives of America’s children today. Consider the increasing numbers of those in poverty who live on the fringe of hope and for whom the worst of times simply last and last and last.  If current research on the developing brain is accurate, and mounting evidence says it is, then the child who sits in that fringe will be hard pressed to move beyond it. For what we are now learning is that the stress to the delicate  brain of a very young child, struggling to survive in a hostile environment punctuated with violence, rejection, hunger, illness, homelessness and fear is too much to permit its normal development. The chemical dance that inhabits and protects us becomes a frenetic force that destroys rather than nurtures and, as a result, the brain forever loses vital connections that have been designed to plan, think, behave, learn and rejoice.

Consider then, the tale of two children...