| A disclaimer: I've worked, rather closely, with the organizations that are affected by what I'm writing about, and I can not be fully objective about this. The people I'm talking about are colleagues and friends.
There was a fairly important legislative session yesterday that included the passage of a bill dubbed "challenges for change" which is likely to have significant impact on our economy, and especially our most vulnerable citizens.
One very specific significant impact will affect child care, its overall quality and the access child care providers have to state resources. As the report on which this legislation was built states:
State human service professionals struggle to create unified and integrated support to consumers and communities. The existing operating environment is rigid and often hinders coordinated policy and practice, as well as inadvertently promotes redundancy and inefficiencies, while failing to address a person or family's multiple, interrelated needs. Federal funding is a primary - although not the only - contributor to this deficiency as it supports an array of public sector human services that operate in programmatic, fiscal and reporting silos.
This is not incorrect. A single family can have multiple needs which intersect several different departments. Child care, health care, unemployment... all these are handled separately and can easily ask for the same information multiple times through many interviews.
But here's the thing-- now that the legislature has approved this bill, it's not looking as likely to manifest itself as providing stronger services. It's looking more likely to centralize the services in Waterbury, eliminating person-to-person contact. There are good and bad things about this, but doing so will provide for collateral damage.
Currently, the Child Development Division has partner organizations throughout the state that provide support for both families and child care providers. Many of these organizations have existed for well over a decade.
Centralizing human services in Waterbury will eliminate a chunk of the staff for many of these organizations and eliminate the option for local walk-in support for people seeking child care. Furthermore, the other services that these organizations provide, such as training and support for child care providers will still need to continue.
But there's a big difference between an agency that has 10-20 people working for it that provides a multitude of services, and one that's had most of its staff reduced and has its services cut down to just a few specialized tasks. Fund raising for these partner organizations could easily fall by the wayside and the organizations could end up disintegrating entirely, leaving a huge gap in their local communities.
I'm all for better efficiency and I'm all for stronger sense of integrated service, but I'm not convinced that this is the way to do it, and I'm thinking the likely outcome isn't better service due to removing barriers and complications. I'm thinking the likely outcome is just less service due to the remoteness of the agencies and the lack of direct human contact.
I get that this is important, but I think the legislature moved fast enough on this to make my head spin and I think one of the reasons they did it now was because there was so much else going on that it could slide under the radar.
It's up to us to see to it that that doesn't happen. |
