The Children's Agenda for California
Defining the goals of
The Children's Movement
Goal 6:
Better coordinating and streamlining the state’s delivery of children’s services, establishing a children’s cabinet and promoting health homes as well as integrated, school-based health centers and other student supports to improve access, cost efficiency and effectiveness.
Specific policy components to consider:
- Developing eligibility and enrollment standards across all income-based children’s programs and facilitating more effective inter-agency cooperation.
The new federal healthcare law requires California to develop a single, streamlined enrollment form for all children and families applying for health coverage on the basis of income. The state should leverage this opportunity to extend new, streamlined eligibility and enrollment standards across all income-based children’s programs. This is an immediate first step the state can take to facilitate more effective inter-agency collaboration. Additionally, California should develop new approaches to training case workers so that they become versed in all of the child-serving programs provided by various state departments. - Establishing a Children’s Cabinet.
The Children’s Cabinet should comprise the heads of each agency and department that serve children’s well-being, and the Superintendent of Public Instruction. The cabinet should be charged with promoting and implementing information sharing, collaboration, increased efficiency and improved service delivery among and within the state’s child-serving agencies and organizations. - Promoting health homes for children.
The state needs to nurture promising health home pilots and bring them to scale. Health homes provide accessible, coordinated, prevention-focused care, including medical, behavioral, dental, vision, and community health and social services. Only half of California children are receiving the complete scope of care they need, as defined by a health home. Visits to hospital emergency departments can be cut substantially when a health home model is used to coordinate care for chronically ill children. - Providing school-based preventive health care and other support services to children.
Children’s access to social services and health care, including dental, vision and mental health, is often lacking because there is no convenient “intake” location. The screening for these critical support services should occur at schools, including early learning and development locations, where children already spend the majority of their time. This common sense reform removes a major barrier to access, enabling more efficient and effective service delivery. Existing integrated programs in California, as well as those in other states and nations, have clearly documented these benefits.
California should expand its use of school-based service delivery models to improve children’s access to preventive screenings and connections to follow-up care, immunizations, and regular dental, vision and mental health care. - Allowing counties and local agencies to blend funding streams that serve children.
Too often, counties and local agencies are forced to keep the myriad state funding streams for their children separate even when they are serving the same child. California has successfully implemented programs that allow local governments to blend funding streams, such as those for children’s mental health and early care settings, in order to increase the efficiency of state investments. California should build on past successes such as the IV-E Waiver program that allowed counties to blend foster care funds. - Strengthening the linkage between environmental protection and children’s health initiatives.
The state should play a leading role in protecting children’s health and well-being through integrated environmental policies. For example, the state should ban bisphenol A (BPA) in baby products. BPA is a known hormone disruptor, and infants and children are at the greatest risk of later problems with brain development and behavior, early puberty, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. The state should also improve indoor air quality in schools to help reduce asthma by educating school management about proper protocols and establishing penalties for air quality problems.
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