EARLY HEAD START

Early Head Start programs come at a time of increasing awareness of the "quiet crisis" facing families with infants and toddlers in the United States. Health and Human Services Secretary's Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers set forth a vision and blueprint for Early Head Start programs to address the fragmentation of community services and expand programs to serve more families with infants and toddlers.

This comprehensive, two generation program includes intensified services that begin before the child is born and concentrates on supporting child development during the critical first three years of the child's life through direct services to the infants and toddlers and by supporting the development of the family.

Early Head Start programs are designed to produce outcomes in four domains:

Seventeen of the funded sites are participating in a national evaluation. Fifteen of these sites are also carrying out local research studies. Catholic University was awarded a cooperative agreement to carry out a local research project as well as a subcontract to collect national evaluation data at our program partner's site.

The National Research Project

The Early Head Start Research and Evaluation project launched a study of the new Early Head Start program and simultaneously began a longitudinal study of infants and toddlers in low-income families. The Early Head Start study includes approximately 3,400 families living in 17 diverse communities that reflect the socioeconomic and political context of low-income families in the United States. The findings from this national evaluation and longitudinal study have the potential to influence policies affecting the lives of millions of American families with young children.  

Early Head Start programs must ensure that at least 10% of their placements are for infants and toddlers with disabilities. This has presented an unprecedented opportunity to study the impact of Early Head Start on infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families in an inclusion program.

Catholic University is the local research partner of United Cerebral Palsy of Washington and Northern Virginia, Inc. (UCP). UCP operates an Early Head Start program for low-income families in the "Route 1" corridor in Northern Virginia. The UCP Early Head Start program is new and serves a population that includes the families of infants and toddlers with disabilities as well as the families of non-disabled infants and toddlers.

The Catholic University Early Head Start research project focuses principally on three issues:

• The ways in which, and the extent to which, participation in Early Head Start assists parents of infants and toddlers with disabilities to obtain other support services and mobilize informal resources to meet their needs and the related impact on their children's development.

• The analysis of the appropriateness of national cross-site infant and toddler evaluation data and techniques in assessing the development of young children with disabilities and, through the use of case studies at the local site, to look at alternative ways of measuring progress.

• The effects of staff and parent training on the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors in caring for infants and toddlers with disabilities.

One hundred fifty families will be randomly assigned to treatment and comparison groups at the UCP site. These racially and ethnically diverse families, including low-income military families from nearby Fort Belvoir, are among the 39% of southern Fairfax County families who live in poverty in the midst of affluence. All families will participate in interviews and assessments for the national and local research projects.