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Part 2: Home-Based Programs
Early Head Start Program Profile
Family Foundations Early Head Start
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
September 22 - 25, 1997
The University of Pittsburgh's Office of Child Development operates an Early Head Start program for 120 families in four centers in three diverse communities in the Pittsburgh area. Across the four centers, the program serves mainly African American and white families headed by single parents, two-thirds of whom were receiving welfare cash assistance when they enrolled in the program. The centers provide services to families in home visits--family advocates visit families weekly to address child development issues, and family development specialists visit families biweekly to work with them on their goals and link them with community services. Staff members also organize group activities for parents and families at each center. Child development services focus on working with parents to improve their interactions with their children.
OVERVIEW
The University of Pittsburgh's Office of Child Development (OCD) operates the Family Foundations Early Head Start (EHS) program. OCD does not provide EHS services to families directly; instead, it contracts with four community-based organizations to host the centers. OCD provides direction to the centers on their activities and programs for families, but each host agency is responsible for management and personnel issues, such as paying salaries and benefits. EHS staff members technically are employees of the host agency staff, but they are co-supervised by OCD's Early Head Start staff.
The three Family Foundations centers previously provided Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) services, and the Clairton Family Center (CFC) operated a Parent Child Center. In making the transition from CCDP to EHS, the Family Foundation Centers have stopped providing direct services to 4- and 5-year-olds and are moving toward a more child-focused implementation of family support principles.
Community Context. The four EHS centers (three are Family Foundations centers, and the fourth is the Clairton Family Center) operate in three distinct communities in the Pittsburgh area. One Family Foundations center is located in an apartment and mobile homes in Terrace Village. That community is comprised of two housing projects in the city's Hill district, where most residents are African American. Another Family Foundations center and the Clairton Family Center are located in Clairton, a 30-minute drive from Pittsburgh. Approximately 60 percent of the residents there are white, and 40 percent are African American. The third Family Foundation center serves the communities of McKees Rocks and Stowe Township (otherwise known as Sto-Rox). Those communities are just across the Ohio River from Pittsburgh and have racially and ethnically heterogeneous populations.
Program Model. OCD's EHS program is a home-based program. Two types of home visitors work with each family. Family advocates conduct weekly visits to families to address child development issues. Family development specialists visit families every other week to discuss family development issues. Other staff members--including the child development specialist, the nurse, the nutritionist, and the community organizer--also make periodic visits to families' homes. Group activities for parents and families are provided at each center.
Families. Three-fourths of the families served by the OCD EHS program are African American, and one-fourth are white. The majority are single-parent families. Approximately 40 percent of the mothers were pregnant when they enrolled in the program. Nearly two-thirds of the families were receiving welfare cash assistance when they enrolled.
Staffing. The program's staffing structure is complex. The three Family Foundations centers have identical structures. Each has a neighborhood coordinator, who oversees the center; a child development specialist, who oversees the family advocates and conducts child assessments; two family advocates; two family development specialists; a community organizer, who is responsible for coordinating the policy council and community activities; and a child center worker, who works in the drop-in center. The Clairton Family Center has a coordinator and two home visitors, who conduct both child and family development home visits. In addition, each center has a half-time nurse from the Allegheny County Public Health Center on-site, to ensure the health of the EHS children and families, and a part?time counselor from the Family Services of Western Pennsylvania. At OCD's central office, the project director oversees the four centers. Other OCD staff members include a child development coordinator, a family development coordinator, a data coordinator, and a medical records data collector.
RECRUITMENT AND ENROLLMENT
Program Eligibility. The OCD EHS centers serve families living in their communities who meet the EHS eligibility requirements. Each Family Foundations center has 40 program slots--22 slots for families participating in the research and 18 for nonresearch families. The Clairton Family Center has 20 slots for EHS families??11 in the research and 9 not participating in the research. Nonresearch families are families who enrolled with children older than one year and families who participated in CCDP or other intensive programs with their older children.
Recruiting Strategies. For major recruitment efforts, center staff members canvass their communities by going door-to-door and distributing packets of materials about the program. These packets include a center brochure, a list of community resources, a newsletter, incentives (such as pencils and magnets), and additional information about services. Centers had not conducted major door-to-door recruitments in the year prior to the site visit, but the program staff members continue to recruit families by visiting Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) offices regularly to identify eligible families, approaching women who might be eligible, and encouraging word-of-mouth publicity among participants.
Enrollment. At the time of the site visit, the EHS program was not at full enrollment; about 110 of the 140 slots were filled. The centers (including CFC) had filled their nonresearch slots, and some were maintaining waiting lists for these slots.
However, centers were having difficulty maintaining full enrollment in their research slots; Sto-Rox and Clairton Family Foundations each had about 16 families enrolled in the research. When research families leave the program, program staff members have difficulty finding replacement families who meet the research criteria. To meet the need for more research families, the Clairton Family Foundations center has extended its service area to West Mifflin, a community outside of Clairton. Currently, about 12 EHS families are from this community. Family Foundations staff in Sto-Rox are also considering extending their service area to recruit more families for the research group. Terrace Village has not extended its service area, but it has continued to serve families who move to other housing, private or public, in the Hill district.
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The three communities served by EHS share characteristics and needs that are common to Allegheny County but are also different in many respects. In part, the communities are defined by their housing communities. Sto-Rox has four housing projects that all have different characters and different resident populations. Community residents and staff members said that residents of these projects strongly identify with the project in which they live. Terrace Village consists of two housing projects, one of which is being renovated under the federally-funded Hope VI project. Clairton has one housing project; most EHS families there live in single-family homes. As a result of the extent of public housing in these communities, Hope VI and the Allegheny County Housing Authority's push to renovate housing have been major forces in these communities. Initiatives to renovate and replace housing already have begun to relocate families and raze buildings. Allequippa Terrace, one of the housing projects in Terrace Village and a Hope VI recipient, is to become a mixed-income housing community with housing for only a portion of current residents. The unemployment rate in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, which was over 6 percent in 1995, is higher than the state and national rates. Clairton, the most isolated community of the three, has few job opportunities in the vicinity. Pittsburgh has some opportunities, but Sto-Rox residents without their own transportation have to rely on a public transportation system that does not accommodate nonstandard working hours. Many county-wide providers serve all three communities. For example, the county office of the Department of Public Welfare (DPW)--the state's welfare agency--covers all three communities. Residents in the communities also tend to use the services of the same early intervention providers, area hospitals, and mental health agencies. The range of services in each community differs, however. Sto-Rox has a wide range of accessible services, due in large part to FOR. Respondents felt that the community had sufficient services for families but that providers could do more to coordinate their services. Now, service providers mostly share information among themselves. Terrace Village also has many services for families in the community. The community environment is less open to collaboration than in Sto-Rox; in Terrace Village, there are still strong territorial claims for families. In Clairton, few providers actually deliver services within the community, and so the existing services are difficult to access. Residents have to travel to McKeesport for many services. A trip to the welfare office, for example, can take three hours in round-trip travel. Similarly, residents' access to health care varies. Sto-Rox residents have easy access to the health services provided by the FOR health clinic, and Terrace Village residents can access clinics nearby. Residents of Clairton have fewer options for health care, and families have to travel outside of the community for pediatric care. Prior to the site visit, one hospital closed a clinic in Clairton that was providing pediatric care, resulting in the loss of a medical home for many children. One health-related issue has affected all communities: the advent of managed care. Health Choices--mandated managed care for Medicaid recipients--was to go into effect in Allegheny County during the year following the site visit. In the meantime, four major managed care providers were heavily recruiting families from their current plans. The companies wanted to have many enrollees when mandatory managed care arrived in the county, so that they could win a Medicaid managed care contract. Often, families were not aware of what these changes meant. For instance, parents frequently did not find out that their family doctor's services were not covered under their new plan until the day of the office visit. |
CHILD DEVELOPMENT CORNERSTONE
Home Visits. When families enroll in the Family Foundations centers, the child development specialist conducts assessments with their children using the Early Learning Accomplishment Profile and The Receptive-Expressive Emergent Language (REEL) scale. The assessments help parents learn age-appropriate activities for their children and gauge the children's progress. After the assessment, parents look through a list of age-appropriate objectives and select the ones they want to work on with their child. These objectives become part of a child's service plan, which is then included in the individual family service plan (IFSP). After the initial assessment, the child development specialist visits the family every six months to revise the child's service plan. When families enroll in the Clairton Family Center, they are assigned a home visitor who follows the Parents as Teachers curriculum in working with the family.
Each EHS family is assigned a family advocate (Family Foundations centers) or home visitor (Clairton Family Center). The main requirements for the family advocate are a high school diploma and residency in the community. Family advocates are expected to conduct weekly home visits to work with the parents on the child development activities they selected. During these visits, family advocates work on helping the parents to play with and relate to their child. In the Family Foundations centers, home visits typically last about an hour, and each family advocate has a caseload of 20 families. In the Clairton Family Center, home visits typically last 90 minutes, and each home visitor has a caseload of 10 families. CFC home visitors, who have different responsibilities from Family Foundations' family advocates, are required to have a college degree.
Family advocates have found it difficult to complete weekly visits with every family in their caseload. Families frequently cancel their appointments or are not home for the appointments. For some families, family advocates have to make two appointments for every completed meeting. Staff members expressed concern that welfare reform will further reduce the time families have available to meet with them. At the time of the site visit, the Clairton Family Center and the Sto-Rox center had vacancies for home visitors and family advocates, so families had not been receiving regular child development home visits in these sites.
Group Child Development Activities. EHS also provides child development services through group activities. Generally, the centers offer parent groups in 6- to 12-week sessions. Depending on the objectives for a particular group, staff members select from several different curricula, such as the Partners In Parenting Education (PIPE) curriculum and the Parent Education for Low-Income Families curriculum. At Sto-Rox, the infant-toddler group meets weekly for 8-week sessions using the PIPE curriculum. A two-member team from the program staff leads these sessions. The Terrace Village center has a young parents group that meets biweekly. Children and parents are separated for the first part of the young parents group and then are brought together for parent-child interactions. Participation in the group activities at the various centers ranges from 4 to 15 families.
| The OCD EHS program delivers child development activities primarily by working with parents to improve their interactions with their children. Staff members work with children and parents together, primarily during home visits, to provide families with opportunities to experience joy in relation to their children, model good parenting practices, and convey the message to parents that their attachment to their children is important and related to their children's competence. |
Child Care Services. The OCD EHS program does not provide child care services directly to families. In the past, under CCDP, Family Foundations worked with a local child care agency, Louise Child Care, to improve the quality of the child care provided to program families. Currently, however, the program is not working with this agency, because few EHS children are enrolled in child care centers or licensed family child care homes. About two-thirds of EHS families are using informal relative care. At the time of the site visit, staff members expected child care to become a more prominent issue for their families as the EHS children become older and their mothers are required by welfare reform to work.
The child development specialists at each program are responsible for monitoring the quality of EHS children's child care. The specialists try to assess the quality of care using National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and Head Start standards. However, they have not been able to assess quality as they did under CCDP because few families are using licensed care and the care is not funded by the program. Under CCDP, Family Foundations paid for the child care of many program families, which made licensed family child care providers feel that they were part of the Family Foundations program. Even though the EHS program has funds set aside for child care, Family Foundations has not been paying for child care under EHS; state child care subsidies have been covering families' child care costs. As a result, the providers with whom Family Foundations used to work have less incentive to work with the program staff.
EHS has become involved in the Early Childhood Initiative (ECI), a joint effort by the United Way and area foundations to develop community-based child care (see below). One EHS center neighborhood coordinator chairs the committee in the community that is formulating the proposal for an ECI grant. Staff members in other centers are also involved in their communities' committees.
The EHS centers have drop-in child care facilities where parents can leave their children for short periods when they are attending on-site parent activities (such as those of the parent council) or meetings atthe centers. With input from the program's Zero to Three consultant, Family Foundations was remodeling its drop-in facilities to meet the requirements for licensed infant-toddler centers, and they were hiring center workers qualified to work with infants and toddlers. OCD hopes that these centers will be used for more than drop-in child care and become places where parents will bring their infants and toddlers to engage in age-appropriate play.
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At the time of the site visit, about two-thirds of EHS families were using child care. Most were relying on relatives or friends to care for their children. All of the EHS communities share concerns about the quality and availability of child care and the effects of welfare reform on families. Respondents in all communities said that there is insufficient child care for families, especially in light of the new welfare work requirements. Parents told stories about poor quality care that children have received from providers in their communities. To address the lack of child care, the United Way of Allegheny County has teamed with area foundations, including the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Richard King Mellon Foundation, to create the Early Childhood Initiative, an initiative to develop community-based child care. Community groups write proposals to the United Way to access this money. In Sto-Rox, the EHS community furthest along in this process, the ECI committee of LINC wrote a proposal to create an early childhood development center using empty school district buildings. The plan is to develop a center that provides comprehensive services to children ages 0 to 5. |
Child Development Assessments. As noted earlier, when families enroll in the centers, the child development specialists conduct child assessments using the Early Learning Accomplishment Profile (ELAP) and The Receptive-Expressive Emergent Language (REEL) scale. They use the assessments to help parents select goals they want to work on with their child. These goals become part of a child's service plan. After the initial assessment, the child development specialist visits the family every six months to conduct a new ELAP and revise the child's service plan.
Health Services. The Allegheny County Public Health Service contributes the services of two nurses to EHS. One nurse works at Terrace Village and Clairton Family Foundations, and the other works at Sto-Rox and the Clairton Family Center. The nurses play a major role in ensuring the health of the EHS children and their families. They conduct health assessments and make biweekly visits to pregnant women and women who have just given birth. Nurses also visit families at other times if the family or an EHS staff member asks them to.
Through a project called HealthLink, the program tracks families' health care. When families enroll in EHS, they sign up for HealthLink and authorize their children's health provider to release their medical records to EHS. The family development specialists routinely ask families if they have received any medical services since their last home visit. If the family has received such services, the home visitor gets a signed release from the family, and a request is made to the physician for information about the medical services provided. EHS requests the medical information from providers and enters the collected data into the EHS medical database. Through this system, nurses and home visitors can track when children are due for immunizations and well-child visits and whether families are receiving care from multiple providers. They can then intervene with the family to ensure that children are immunized and that there is a consistent health care provider. The nurses can also help the family understand the health care information that comes from the health care provider.
A group of EHS program staff members has formed an infant mental health committee. Home visitors present problem cases, ones in which the child is not responding well and appears to have attachment problems, to the committee for advice. Several experts in infant mental health also attend these sessions to help staff members work with these families.
Services for Children with Disabilities. EHS staff members refer children with suspected or diagnosed disabilities to the Alliance for Infants, Allegheny County's gatekeeper for Part C services. After conducting an assessment, representatives from this agency refer families to one of the county's providers for Part C services, such as the Early Learning Institute or the Association for Retarded Citizens. EHS staff members work with the Part C providers by discussing families when necessary and sharing Individual Family Service Plans (IFSPs). At the time of the site visit, 5 percent of EHS children were receiving early intervention services from one of the Part C providers, and staff members estimated that an additional 14 percent of children were at risk for developmental delays, based on a list of risk factors developed by the program and approved by the Head Start Bureau.
Transitions. An EHS family's transition from EHS begins about six months before the child ages out of the program. For three months, the number of child development home visits is reduced from four to two per month and the number of family development home visits is reduced from two to one per month. For the remaining three months, the child development home visitor visits the home monthly. Parents are given a resource guide at the end of the program to help them through the process of transitioning their children to preschool and Head Start. At the time of the site visit, a few former CCDP families were about to transition out of EHS.
FAMILY DEVELOPMENT CORNERSTONE
Needs Assessments and Service Planning. EHS staff members do not decide which services should be provided to the family. Instead, the family chooses its own objectives and decides what aspects it would like to focus on with the family development specialist. The family does a self-assessment (developed by Mid-Iowa Community Action, Inc.) that leads them to identify their priorities and goals.
Each family enrolled in the Family Foundations centers has a team of EHS staff members with whom it has regular contact: the family advocate, the child development specialist, the family development specialist, the community organizer, the nurse, and the nutritionist. (The CFC team consists of the home visitor, the nurse, and the nutritionist.) Each member of this team, including the adults in the family, has input into the family needs assessment and the development of the family's integrated IFSP. The IFSP is developed over a period of several months, and it is updated every six months.
Case Management. Family development specialists in the Family Foundations centers help families by showing them how to apply for jobs, connecting them with other service providers, helping them through social services' application processes, and providing any other support that is needed. The family development specialist is expected to visit each family in her caseload (20 families) for one hour every two weeks; in reality, visits are completed about once a month, on average. Family development specialists are required to have a college degree. In the Clairton Family Center, the home visitors who conduct child development activities also work with families on family development goals.
| The OCD EHS program is based on a family support approach. EHS staff members build on families' strengths; they help family members recognize their strengths and identify and achieve their goals. Although this basic approach has not changed, the program was shifting the main focus of its family development services from the adult, as it was when the program operated as a Comprehensive Child Development Program, to the child. Family development specialists will work with the adult as the child's parent first and as an adult second. The child-focused, parent-centered approach to family development was new, and at the time of the site visit, OCD EHS staff members were just beginning to work on adapting their family support principles to reflect this new focus. |
Health Services. EHS has an agreement with Family Services of Western Pennsylvania to provide counseling to EHS families. The three counselors assigned to the EHS centers are being integrated into the team structure. Home visitors are introducing the counselors to all families, and families who need counseling can make appointments with the counselors.
The program nutritionist, who works half-time for the Sto-Rox center's home agency and half?time for EHS, provides similar services to program families. The nutritionist visits all families to conduct a nutritional screening and to provide advice on healthy eating. She makes additional visits if program staff members are concerned about a family's eating practices.
Father Involvement. Each of the EHS centers has at least one male staff member. These staff members had started or were planning to start programs for fathers. In Sto-Rox, the family development specialist has a core group of about six men who regularly attend the monthly meetings. Terrace Village also has an active fathers group. In general, center staff members encourage fathers to participate in all activities, but they are not always home during home visits.
Parent Involvement in the Program. Family Foundations encourages parent involvement in two ways. First, each of the centers has a parent council, composed of all enrolled families, that elects its own officers and defines its own mission. Council activities include providing feedback to the program, giving input to the staff on hiring decisions, setting policies about the center's van usage (each center has its own van or has access to a van), and making plans for field visits. The councils also receive $3,000 each in grant money to spend as they see fit. The program itself also has a policy council that has parent representatives from all four EHS centers. This council has similar authority for the overall program. Recently, the policy council hired the new program director and the data coordinator. Second, parents are encouraged to attend group activities, such as the parenting groups and outings.
Attendance in parent involvement activities varies across centers. In Sto-Rox, about 20 parents participate in the monthly parent council meetings. Staff members in Terrace Village said that about one-quarter of their families participate in the parent council. The Clairton Family Foundations parent council was in flux at the time of the site visit, with only a handful of parents participating. Many of the parents on the parent councils entered the program when it was a CCDP; EHS parents were just beginning to participate in these activities.
STAFF DEVELOPMENT CORNERSTONE
Training. Family Foundations/CFC uses the same approach to staff development as it uses for family development--it builds on staff members' strengths. Family Foundations provides many training opportunities, including formal training and informal training during regularly scheduled meetings. EHS staff members receive training from the OCD Family Support Training Center, which provides training for the staffs of the family support centers in Pittsburgh on a wide range of topics, including infant and toddler development, children with special needs, infant mental health, child abuse, drug abuse, home visiting, relationship building, facilitating groups, and involving fathers. Staff members have also received cultural awareness training. Most training opportunities are open to all staff members to promote cross-training, so that the work with families is more integrated. In addition to training from the Family Support Training Center, staff members may seek training from other agencies.
During the year prior to the site visit, the child development coordinator conducted a series of training sessions on child development based on the training received from WestEd. All staff members participated in these training sessions to prepare them to integrate the child development focus into all activities. OCD staff members were planning to follow up these training sessions with additional ones that relate the new child development focus to each staff member's responsibilities.
The training agenda for fall 1997 focused on the analysis of the Head Start performance standards. Each OCD and center staff member was participating in two committees that had responsibility for analyzing a set of the performance standards. For example, the child development specialists were working as a group to analyze the child development standards. Each child development specialist was also participating on a second committee. Once the analysis of the standards was complete, the program expected to revise its work plan to ensure the program's alignment with the standards.
Staff Supervision and Support. The OCD staff meets regularly with the center staff. Family development specialists from all four centers meet biweekly, as do the community organizers. Family advocates and child development specialists attend monthly meetings at OCD, and the child development specialists also meet separately with the child development coordinator once a month. Often, OCD staff members prepare training on some aspect of the staff members' work for these meetings. The meetings also are opportunities for staff members to exchange their ideas and resources.
Each center holds weekly meetings to discuss the families participating in the program. These team meetings provide opportunities to discuss individual cases and to share experiences. The cases come up in these meetings on a regular schedule. These formal exchanges are in addition to the informal ongoing discussions that staff members have among themselves.
Staff members generally feel that they are paid inadequately for the work they do. However, the wages for most positions are commensurate with those of other jobs in the field. In the past, the program has had to deal with disparities between the wages and benefits of the different home agencies. The program has worked hard to make salaries equitable across agencies.
Staff Turnover. Staff turnover has varied across the different centers. In some centers, staff members have worked for Family Foundations since the beginning of CCDP. Terrace Village, which serves a very hard-to-serve population, tends to have a higher staff turnover rate than the other centers. In the year prior to the site visit, EHS lost seven staff members at the centers and three at the central office. Two of the seven center staff members were dismissed for inadequate performance; the others left for new job opportunities or for personal reasons.
COMMUNITY BUILDING CORNERSTONE
Each Family Foundations center employs a community organizer who is responsible for attending meetings in the community and working with the parent council. The community organizer also works with the parents to get them involved in the community.
Program Collaborations. The central collaborators with the EHS program are the agencies that provide on-site services to EHS families--the Family Services of Western Pennsylvania and the Allegheny County Health Department. Other collaborators include the Northern Southwest Community, which provides staff training on working with families with a history of drug and alcohol abuse; the Alliance for Infants, the gatekeeper for Part C services; and the Urban League, which provides emergency assistance.
Interagency Collaboration. Each of the three EHS communities has a different set of service providers. In Sto-Rox, the main social service agency is Focus on Renewal (FOR), the host agency for Family Foundation, and the Sto-Rox Family Foundations center works collaboratively with the other FOR programs. Family Foundations also is a key partner in a community collaborative called the Local Interactive Network for Children and Families (LINC). The neighborhood coordinator chairs the subcommittee of LINC that is developing the community's proposal for the Early Childhood Initiative (see below). The Sto-Rox center works with other providers, including the school district and the Sto-Rox Family Support Center. In Terrace Village, the Family Foundations staff works with Hill House, a community agency providing many services to residents, and with other family programs on the Hill. In Clairton, which has fewer service providers, the centers tend to collaborate with each other and the school district. Staff members at all centers work with families' case managers at the welfare department and with early intervention providers.
EHS staff members at the central office are also involved in community
building. They focus on developing county-wide networks and connections and on increasing communications
with other community service providers. EHS staff members have met with those of other programs
that provide early childhood education services to share resources and increase communications.
Staff members at each Family Foundations site--often the community organizers??have also joined
community groups that meet to discuss collaborations. In addition, each of the EHS centers has
a parent representative on the policy board of the county family support program's network.
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Welfare reform already has had a major impact on families and the EHS program. Two-thirds of EHS families were receiving cash assistance when they enrolled in the program. Parents receiving cash assistance have to begin work immediately unless they are younger than 18 and in school; are verified as disabled; have a child under the age of 6 with no available child care; or are single parents of a child younger than 12 months. Adults who are not working must take an 8-week job search course as part of their "work first" activities. This course may be followed by additional job search or short-term training, depending on individual circumstances. Individuals may receive cash assistance for a maximum of five years over their lifetime. EHS program staff members and other community members, including parents, expressed confusion about how welfare reform is being implemented. Many individuals stated that the rules continually change and that welfare case workers are not always clear on how to apply the new rules to their cases. Another factor making welfare reform hard for families is the lack of good-paying jobs for people with poor skills. Although many EHS families have infants at home and are not yet formally
affected by the work requirements, EHS staff members are finding that many parents are no
longer available for home visits. Staff members reported that families kept their weekly
and biweekly appointments more often under CCDP than they do now under EHS. Families that
have been active program participants in the past now have too many pressures on their time
to be active participants. |
Community Building Among Parents. During the initial family assessment process, the community organizer visits each family and completes a community skills assessment, which identifies the family's skills and interests. Then, he or she encourages parents to become involved in specific community activities.
In a group discussion, parents on the parent and policy councils credited the program with their involvement in their communities. The program did not directly connect them with community activities, but it was responsible for expanding their sense of community. The program brought them in contact with other families that share similar concerns and experiences.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND LOCAL RESEARCH
Early Program Support. Staff members relied on a consultant from Zero to Three to help shift the program's focus from the family to the child, as required by the Head Start Bureau. The consultant visited the program several times to work with program staff on designing the drop-in facilities to meet standards of licensed infant-toddler centers. She also has encouraged the program to staff the facilities with individuals qualified to work with infants and toddlers. In addition, staff members received support from the federal project officer and benefitted from training provided by the national technical assistance team (Zero to Three and WestEd).
Continuous Program Improvement. Family Foundations and CFC collect both qualitative and quantitative data to inform the EHS director and other staff members. about the direction the program is taking. Family Foundations has an on-site data coordinator who collects data that program staff members can use to evaluate their progress.
The EHS staff works closely with its local research partner, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health and the Office of Child Development, on continuous program improvement. The principal investigators on the research team attend the program's weekly program development team meetings, at which the team members discuss the program, changes to the program, policies, and strategies. The program also worked with the local research team's ethnographer under CCDP and developed a close relationship. The program staff will use the ethnographer's qualitative work to improve the delivery of EHS services.
Local Research. The local research focuses on the family support approach to delivering services. The local research team, which includes experts in program evaluation, early cognitive development, and ethnographic research, will explore how this approach affects two intermediate outcomes: (1) the quality of relationships; and (2) community, family, and child empowerment and efficacy. The team will also study how these outcomes interact and how these outcomes relate to other program outcomes. Another focus of the local research is the effects of policy changes on the community, program, families, and children. The research is designed to go beyond assessing the effect of the quantity of services received on outcomes to assessing how the approach to service delivery affects program effectiveness. To address all of these issues, local researchers are collecting qualitative (mostly ethnographic) and quantitative data. They are supplementing the data collected for the national EHS evaluation with more detailed data on father-figure involvement, cultural pride, parents' psychological well-being, and economic self-sufficiency.
PROGRAM SUMMARY
The OCD EHS program provides child and family development services primarily to single parent families, many of whom receive welfare cash assistance, in home visits and group activities. At the time of the site visit, the program was adapting its family support principles to reflect a new focus on children. The program's approach to family development services was becoming more child-focused and parent-centered.
PROGRAM DIRECTORS
Laurie Mulvey
University of Pittsburgh
Office of Child Development
Early Head Start Program
5600 Penn Avenue
Penn Plaza Apartments, Suite 208
Pittsburgh, PA 15206
Flora Woratschek
University of Pittsburgh
Office of Child Development
Early Head Start Program
5600 Penn Avenue
Penn Plaza Apartments, Suite 208
Pittsburgh, PA 15206
LOCAL RESEARCHERS
Beth Green
Department of Psychology
Portland State University
P.O. Box 751
Portland, OR 97207
Carol McAllister
University of Pittsburgh
Graduate School of Public Health
230 Parran Hall
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Robert McCall
UCSUR/121 University Place
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
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