Early Intervention for Pierce County Children
When I first started on the Council I met department heads from around the county including our Juvenile Court Administrator TJ Bohl. While most of our discussion was about their good work reducing the juvenile incarceration rates, there was also an unmistakable and alarming trend in his department’s numbers.
Child dependency filings and removals rates were already high in Pierce County and rapidly increasing. So high that our numbers exceed King County despite it being almost 2.5 times the population. This was my first hint of the scale of the opioid epidemic in Pierce County.
Tragically, these cases often involve very young children and infants. Research has shown that by the time we’ve reached the point of removal, the trauma from neglect and abuse will leave a lasting mark on that child. Finding a way to intervene earlier would spare the child, help the parent, and reduce the social costs.
With the caseload becoming a crisis, Judge Kitty-Ann van Doorninck reached out to Rep. Laurie Jinkins for help. She asked me to join given the issue’s intersection with the opioids. We were joined by representatives from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, Attorney General’s Office and State Department of Social & Health Services.
It was clear that what we needed to do is get to families as early as possible, identify their needs, deliver services, and prevent the abuse or neglect from happening.
The response is a pilot program that will take place in three geographically contiguous zip codes with the highest removal rates in Tacoma, Lakewood, and Parkland. We picked a model known as Help Me Grow (HMG) that has been successful in other parts of the country. The pilot is funded with a $250,000 grant that Rep. Jinkins was able to put into the State budget and I obtained additional financial and technical support from the National Association of Counties.
The pilot program’s goals are:
- Reduce the number of dependencies filed on children age 0–3 in pilot zip codes.
- Improve child and family health.
- Gain population information on services needed and offered.
- Develop a comprehensive system of services and support for families of children Birth-5 years old.
Our objectives over the next several months are to:
- Design centralized access point for HMG that builds upon existing resources in the community.
- Assist in the design of the centralized access point and developmental screening tools that will work for medical providers. Design an outreach strategy for providers to utilize the system, once implemented.
- Recommend and/or design a screening tool for centralized access point. Create data plan to measure progress and outcomes in population data, centralized access data, and planning process.
- Design marketing plan and recruitment tools for community partners to use in connecting families to the centralized access.
Through the NACo program we’ll be sharing ideas and refining the project with other jurisdictions in our cohort. The Pritzger Family Foundation which is funding the effort, wants to build on what’s successful and develop it into a national movement to improve the health and readiness of children across the country.
