Cuyahoga County Early Childhood Initiative Evaluation: Phase II Final Report

Since mid-1999, a bold initiative has been underway in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to improve the well-being of the youngest members of the greater Cleveland community. A community-wide initiative targeting children from birth through age five and their families was launched in July 1999, and in the following 5 years demonstrated substantial success in developing a universal and comprehensive approach for supporting families with young children. The Cuyahoga County Early Childhood Initiative (ECI), renamed Invest in Children in late 2004, provides a powerful case example of how one urban community recognized the needs of its young children and their families and sought to address them in an ongoing, comprehensive, and multifaceted way. The main findings of the report include: (1) A community-wide network of services for young children and their families has been established, and the apparatus of county government has been altered to directly support and coordinate early childhood services; (2) More children under age six in Cuyahoga County are receiving needed services at earlier ages than ever before; (3) Children and their parents are beginning to show benefits from the services provided through the Initiative; (4) Efforts to deepen and extend the services, tailor them to individual needs, and assure continuing quality should continue; and (5) The public and private partners who established this Initiative have maintained their commitment for half a decade and recently recommitted to it, with a new strategic plan that outlines a continued focus on program improvement based on evaluation. The evaluation identified areas of ongoing challenge and recommendations to address these include: (1) Develop supplemental approaches to home-based strategies, involving individualized services tailored to caregiver characteristics, to engage (a) more at-risk families, and (b) family child care providers; (2) Develop a system to identify and intervene with families with a young child who lacks a consistent source of medical care (i.e., a medical home); (3) Promote quality improvement strategies for family child care and home visiting that include attracting qualified and motivated individuals to deliver services; (4) Continue supports and services for children with special needs; (5) Continue efforts to expand newborn home visiting beyond first time and teen parents; and (6) Advocate for high quality preschool programs and universal pre-kindergarten programs. Individual chapters contain appendices, footnotes and references. (Contains 73 tables and 67 figures.) [This paper was submitted by the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences of the Case Western Reserve University with the Chapin Hall Center for Children of the University of Chicago and with consultants from Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For "Cuyahoga County Early Childhood Initiative Evaluation: Phase II Final Report. Executive Summary," see ED533518.]