Children's Alliance sets its 2005 Agenda for Children

November 30, 2004

1. Meet our obligation to protect New Hampshire's most vulnerable children by accrediting our child protection system.

In 1979, when the Legislature adopted the Child Protection Act (RSA 169-C), the state of New Hampshire assumed the awesome responsibility of protecting children "whose life, health or welfare is endangered…" and providing "the care, emotional security, guidance and control that will promote the child's best interest." It clearly stated that abused and neglected children have the right to protection, care, treatment, counseling, supervision, and rehabilitative resources.

The state has never lived up to that promise. Inadequate public funding has resulted in staffing cutbacks and freezes, unreasonable workloads and high staff turnover. The result has been children left in homes where they aren't safe, insufficient resources to make their homes safe, and child left in foster homes and institutions longer than necessary.

The Council on Accreditation for Children and Family Services bases its standards on best practices developed by the Child Welfare League of America. The Children's Alliance recommends that NH require in law that its child protection system achieve and maintain accreditation. This would create a "floor" beneath which services for abused and neglected kids would not be allowed to fall.

A report issued in February by the Child Welfare League stated that accreditation of NH's Division for Children, Youth and Families is both attainable and affordable. Require that accreditation-related reports be public documents would also make DCYF more publicly accountable that it currently is.

The Child Protection Task Force, which includes the Children's Alliance of NH, Child and Family Services, CASA, NFI North and other partners, will bring a bill this session requiring DCYF to become accredited and to maintain that accreditation.

2. Fund The Gap between NH's minimum education standards and its level of state aid.

The Children's Alliance believes that all children should have equal opportunity to realize their dreams, and that education is the foundation of opportunity. A child's educational opportunity should not be determined by where in his or her family happens to live. In particular, children who live in lower-income communities, neighborhoods and families need the economic and social boost that a quality education provides.

The NH Legislature has been unwilling or unable to meet the mandate of the NH Supreme Court by defining what an adequate education involves, and paying for it. State aid accounts for only about 20 percent of the actual cost of educating our public school students.

The Children's Alliance proposes that, at minimum, the state pay the full cost of its own minimum education standards and rules. These standards and rules cover facilities and programs, and include accountability provisions, special education, teacher qualification and 15 programs of study. They are the closest New Hampshire has come to a statement of what every school should offer.

The NH Citizens' Voice Project has calculated the difference between the actual cost of implementing some bare-bones state educational requirements and the state education funding provided to local communities.

The requirements used in the calculation were staff needed to implement basic academic requirements, some building costs, transportation and system leadership (SAU and school board costs). These alone do not provide an adequate or quality education -- they exclude many other important and required items -- but they are basic requirements that schools must provide and that the State should fund.

The average gap is $2,125 per student, totaling $425 million statewide. The gap for local communities varies depending on how much state funding they receive, but exceeds $5,000 per pupil in some communities.

The NH Board of Education is in the process of revising the state's standards. This is an opportunity to determine their costs and Fund The Gap between that total figure and state education aid to school districts.

3. Preserve and expand health services for low-income families and children (Medicaid, Healthy Kids, etc.)

Helping low-income families and children is not must the right thing to do, it's one of the smartest investments we can make in a productive workforce, better health (and lower health costs), and stronger communities. In the particular case of Medicaid, for every $1 New Hampshire invests in the health of its youngest and eldest citizens, it sees a $2 return in business activity.

State officials are negotiating an "1115 waiver" that is likely to include a cap on the amount of federal Medicaid dollars available to New Hampshire. The draft of the "GraniteCare" plan that has been presented to the Legislature include replacing moving children from New Hampshire's highly successful Healthy Kids insurance program into "health services accounts" in which poor parents would have incentive not to get routine medical treatment for their children.

Consumers who have used all of the funds in their accounts will receive cards that can be used to buy discounted prescriptions at participating pharmacies. Families in this income bracket do not have the income even to buy discounted drugs, and some will forego medicine their children need. And if a rural pharmacy declines to participate in a discount drug program, access to the lower-cost drugs might be closed off to local families.

This is a critical children's health issue. Medicaid provides health coverage for 25% of children under age 5, a figure that rises to 60% in Coos County.

The Children's Alliance believes that rather than erecting barriers to care, New Hampshire should ensure that every child and low-income family has access to a full range of care, including mental and oral health services. That would require funding Healthy Kids at a level that allows it to identify and enroll the hardest-to-reach families, and reimbursing health providers at a level that makes care accessible to families no matter where they live.

4. Invest in home visitation, early intervention and early education programs.

The recent boom in early brain research has taught us that children are "wired" for feelings and ready to learn earlier than was earlier thought and that nurturing relationships and early experiences affect that wiring.

We now know that different kinds of experiences cause different chemicals to be released in a young child's brain, and that those chemicals have important effects on the child's development. The brains of infants and toddlers are like a plant's immature root system; both require the right environment to flourish. In the brain, positive experiences release chemicals that promote growth and development, while chemicals associated with stress stunt development by making it harder for neurons to form connections.

In other words, development isn't a question of nature or nurture, it's both, and both begin in the womb.

Investing in early childhood is the right thing to do economically, and socially. Research shows that every $1 invested in quality early care saves $7 in later social costs. Home visiting programs help prevent child abuse and educate parents at the time when they have the most questions. Early intervention programs help identify and treat developmental deficits and disabilities before a child falls too far behind his or her peers, and decreases the need for (and cost of) special education services. The availability of quality, affordable early education ensures that as many children as possible start school ready to learn.

The Children's Alliance recommends that the state invest in home visiting, early intervention and early education programs, and that it incorporate public kindergarten and early education into its minimum education standards and fully fund them.

5. Improve New Hampshire's estimated 25 percent dropout rate.

According to the NH Center for Public Policy Studies, one in every four students who enter ninth grade in a New Hampshire public school will not graduate. This not only is a waste of human potential; it is an economic disaster in the making.

The falling high school completion rate threatens not only the health and well-being of the next generation of New Hampshire children, but also the workforce preparedness of the state. The lesser skill level and earning capacity of high school dropouts affects New Hampshire's labor market capacity, per capita income, and tax revenues.

The Children's Alliance believes that New Hampshire needs to assure a quality education for every child today so that it has a prepared workforce tomorrow. Just as we make infrastructure investments in roads and bridges, we need to make human capital investments in quality public education.