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Head Start receives grant to expand services

The Local Interagency Coordinating Council met Tuesday morning.

The Local Interagency Coordinating Council, which meets quarterly, is a group open to service providers, parents, and advocates of children involved in school, early intervention, or mental health services.

According to chair Tammy Rice, referrals to Forest-Warren Human Services Early Intervention have remained steady. That department will also be working on its self-verification, which is due at the end of May.

Rice went through the results of the annual family survey, sent out by the state annually to families of children who receive early intervention services. The survey provided data for Warren and Forest counties for 2015 through 2016 and is based on answers to a questionnaire. The survey asked families to rate their satisfaction with different components of the program, including things like service delivery and outcomes. The state average, Rice said, is 93 percent satisfaction this year. Forest-Warren Human Service’s Early Intervention satisfaction rating was 94 percent.

Meghan Stefanucci, IU5 Supervisor, said that another part-time staff member was being hired as a service coordinator to provide initial contacts and screenings with students. She also said that trainings on how to manage challenging behaviors were being planned for the future and would be open to preschool providers as well as other service providers.

Nicole Phillips, Education and Mental Health Coordinator for Warren’s Head Start program, said that the program has received its grant to expand services.

To that end, she said, 40 percent of students, all in Warren classrooms, will be seeing a six-hour-per-day, five-day-per-week class schedule as opposed to the current four day per week offering. Also, she said, the two classrooms that provide half-day instruction — a three-and-a-half-hour day, four days a week — will be discontinued and replaced with the expanded class time.

The remaining 60 percent of students will be going four days a week, five hours a day, next year, Phillips said.

By 2021, she said, all Head Start and Pre-K Counts classrooms will be on a five day a week, six-hour-a-day schedule.

Tara McQuaid, Regional Director of the Achievement Center, talked about how families are struggling with the steps needed to get children enrolled in Medical Assistance, as all services from the Achievement Center are covered by MA. She also talked about what services the Achievement Center provides and their approach to service, saying that mobile therapists, family-based mental health providers, and behavioral service consultants from that agency try to figure out what the function of a behavior is for a child and from there why children engage in certain behaviors before trying to implement interventions.

Rice asked whether families involved with the Achievement Center share with that staff when they are also receiving Early Intervention staff. McQuaid said that Achievement Center staff are part of an overall treatment team, and that when they know other services are being provided they make every attempt to both prevent duplication of services as well as to avoid negating the services provided by other agencies with their own interventions. Sometimes, she said, families simply don’t let her staff know of other services being provided, either because they aren’t aware of the significance of that information or because they simply choose not to.

The next meeting of the Local Interagency Coordinating Council is scheduled for 10 a.m. March 21.

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