Michigan’s CCEP Program: Babies in Child Care Can’t Wait Important update regarding promising funding for CCEP

As you may know,

A Policy Alert:  A Supplemental Bill MAY Breathe New Life Into CCEP

Rep. Cushingberry has prepared a draft budget supplemental for the DCH budget which includes the $1 mill for CCEP, restoring what was eliminated in the recently passed DCH Budget.  Some Committee members, who are not necessarily opposed to the program but hadn’t heard of it, expressed serious reservations – ‘the ink is barely dry on the DCH budget and we’re back trying to get a $1 million program restored? Where’s the money coming from?’A final hearing and vote on the supplemental bill will be November 10th.  This bill, if it passes the full House Appropriations, must then go to Senate Appropriations where things get even tougher.  Getting $1 million into DCH just after its FY 01-11 budget was signed is going to be a stiff climb. You can help by writing to the House Appropriations Committee members to express you strong support for funding for CCEP.  Act Now.  Babies and Young Children Cannot WAIT!

Child Care Expulsion Prevention Program (CCEP)

CCEP History and Approach

·       The Child Care Expulsion Prevention Program is an early childhood mental health consultation program (ECMHC) that has historically been funded through DHS through an interdepartmental agreement with MDCH, using earmarked discretionary dollars from Michigan’s federal Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).

·       ECMHC is believed to be a cost-effective approach (Upshur et al., 2009) and is often justified as a way to prevent the extraordinary costs associated with treating behavioral problems at a later point within the life of a child (e.g., juvenile justice system, incarceration).

·       CCEP uses a public health framework to promote social and emotional health and prevent social and emotional risk for young children birth to five and their caregivers (child care providers and families) to ameliorate long term negative impacts to children’s ability to succeed in school and life. 

·       Specifically, CCEP projects serve licensed child care centers, licensed group day care homes, registered family day care homes, Department of Human Services enrolled day care aides and enrolled relative care providers.

·        Since 1999, CCEP has used a high quality, nationally recognized approach to provide these services across the state.  Although projects may vary somewhat from site to site due to region, population, etc. there are six cornerstones that are mandatory within contracts and essential to any project that provides CCEP.  

Numbers served FY07 through FY09

Child/Family

·       In three years there were 1,592 children birth to age five that received direct child family centered consultation. 

·       In these three years, approximately 81% of the children served have positive outcomes, meaning they do not experience expulsion, additionally 13% of families ended services or data was not available on outcomes (e.g. family moved, child care closed down, family disenrolled child due to loss of job, etc.). Three percent of children were expelled but the consultant was able to help the child transition to a new child care site and three percent of kids referred were expelled without follow up.

·       In these three years, approximately 25,658 children were impacted indirectly by CCEP consultants. This is a total count of the children enrolled in the child care sites that received child/family centered consultation.  

·       In these three years, 1,005 child care sites received services, positively effecting quality practices for children.

Specialized Social-Emotional Training

From FY07 through FY09,

·       470 specialized trainings were offered to families, child care providers and community early childhood partners.

·       9,693 families, child care providers and community early childhood partners were trained.

CCEP has had a strong eleven-year history of providing services on behalf of young children and their families, meeting and exceeding annual goals set, FY10 presented challenges due to the many changes (ages served, eligibility, large expansion of service area, and loss of 6 CCEP projects) as can be seen in Table 1.  

Table 1.                  Changes to CCEP Program in FY10

How do we Know CCEP Works?  Evaluation Highlights

Results from a 4-year evaluation by Michigan State University suggest that the CCEP program has substantial positive outcomes for participating children, families and child care providers. Highlights of the final evaluation report (in press, 2010) indicate:

·       Parents of children receiving CCEP services reported greater improvements in hyperactivity, attention problems and social skills than the parents in the comparison group.

·       Child care providers reported greater improvements in hyperactivity than the providers of comparison children.

·       6 months post CCEP services, most of children’s behavioral concerns continued to show improvements.

·       By the end of services, parents receiving CCEP services reported a significant moderate decrease in parenting stress and significant moderate increases in empowerment in advocating for their child.

·       At the beginning of the evaluation data collection, almost a third of CCEP parents had missed or been late to work due to child care issues, by time two data collection, 63% of these parents had not lost work or school time.

·       Child care providers reported significant improvements in competence with dealing with challenging behavior. CCEP consultation services were viewed very positively by all those involved.  Ratings reflected "strong agreement" with the benefits of this consultation approach.

What Happens if We Do Not Invest in CCEP?

The cost of not supporting the social-emotional-behavioral health of children is to knowingly consign a significant proportion of our youngest citizens to school failure.  The cost of school failure is to engender a wide range of societal problems that are expensive and very difficult to ameliorate.  Investing early is crucial because:

1.     Early relationships set the stage for healthy or unhealthy brain development.                                              

2.     Poor early social-emotional-behavioral development predicts early school failure, which in turn predicts later school failure.

3.     Early intervention can reduce later higher-cost interventions.