Strengthening Families and the Child Welfare System
What’s the PIP and What’s it Got to Do with Prevention?
Every five years Idaho’s Child Welfare
program undergoes a federal review to
determine how well it is doing in meeting a
series of bench-marks related to child
well-being. The program recently finished
its Children and Family Services Review and
is now engaged in developing the PIP or
Program Improvement Plan.
If we see ourselves as part of a continuum of services for children that begins with strengthening families and their ability to raise healthy and happy children and continues through various family interventions, removal of children from their homes, foster care and adoption,
the whole system hopes that we can be successful at the front end.
The PIP looks to making those changes and we can help. ICTF grantees and other partners are already doing some pieces of the PIP including:
• Building collaborative relationships within the communities;
• Increasing the engagement of fathers in parenting;
• Engaging extended families, child care workers and others in safety plans that aid prevention work;
• Promoting relative placements as first options wherever it is viable and safe;
• Addressing the over representation of native children in the foster care system.
The PIP may provide an opportunity for ICTF and our partners to collaborate with the Department of Health and Welfare to remake a system that is often condemned as too punitive and help it focus where we’d all like to see it: on prevention of child abuse and neglect before it ever occurs.
Taking the Show on the Road
Idaho’s Strengthening Families program, a collaboration between the Trust Fund and the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children (Idaho AEYC), continues to grow locally and gain recognition on the national level.
Strengthening Families training is available in every region of the state, and this year 250 providers have attended 125 trainings throughout Idaho. Here is what one family provider has to say about the training:
I am so grateful for this class and our new experiences that not only have benefited our daycare families, but our lives as well. I would strongly suggest this series to everyone no matter how long you’ve worked with children or how skeptical you may be-- this series will definitely forever change you life and the lives of the children in your community.
In addition to positively impacting families in Idaho, our
Strengthening Families work is gaining national recognition. Recently, Idaho was chosen as one of just three
peer states selected to guide the rest of the nation in embedding
Strengthening Families into Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS).
Strengthening Families has been included as a quality standard in Idaho’s QRIS from the very beginning.
In its role as a peer state, Idaho is participating in national discussions around program evaluation as we work to establish
Strengthening Families as an evidence-based practice with concrete, measurable ties to child abuse and neglect prevention.
Idaho’s Strengthening Families curriculum is also gaining national attention. In November, Idaho AEYC staff traveled to New Jersey to train 55 CCR&R trainers in the 17-hour curriculum. The training was well-received and has been recommended to the national network of states participating in
Strengthening Families. Here is a comment from New Jersey:
[Trainers] are going nuts over the kits!! They simply love the comprehensiveness as well as the ease of using them. They are now a critical part of the SF effort here in NJ. One of our trainers suggested that the Idaho kit be a “gold standard” states try to achieve in order to really implement this work effectively.
Strengthening Families through Early Care and Education continues to attract the attention of foundations, policy makers, and national leaders, and we are proud to say that Idaho is well poised to continue its role as a leader in the field of child abuse and neglect prevention.
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