Reports and Fact Sheets

Our 13th annual State of Child Welfare report provides a 5-year analysis of how Pennsylvania fares with practices around child safety, placement, and permanency and includes county-level data and statewide and geographic trends to improve the child welfare system. We continue to analyze racial disparity and disproportionality across the child welfare system’s population (age 0-20).

Transition age youth—age 14 to 21—are older youth in the foster care system transitioning to permanency with a caregiver or aging out of the system to adulthood. Transition age youth often struggle with this life transition due to unique circumstances with being a foster child.

In an effort to improve Pennsylvania’s child welfare system, our 12th annual State of Child Welfare – a five-year analysis of how Pennsylvania fares with practices around child safety, placement and permanency – raises concerns about the need to strengthen the child welfare system as it uses data from 2020 – only the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic – that shows decreases in child protective services reporting and the number of children placed in foster care statewide.

The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) is historic child welfare legislation enacted in February 2018 as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act. This fact sheet provides an update on the state Family First Prevention Services Act plan, promoting the use of front-end, evidence-based services and aims to prevent out-of-home placements for children. 

Front-line workers, those we think of as essential in our communities and across the Commonwealth, include the child welfare caseworkers who hold high-stress, low-reward jobs to help the children and families they serve. However, high rates of turnover in this field create long-term consequences in practice, policy and state and county budgets.

Family connections that help children and youth thrive, provide identity and security, and tie them to culture and traditions are necessary for the heathy development of every child.

This report makes recommendations for ensuring that when children or youth must be removed from the home, they remain with kin — family or friends they know and trust — to reduce the trauma of removal by providing continuity of care and connections to their family and community, ultimately improving outcomes for the children down the road.

Start Strong PA is a statewide campaign of partners advocating for increased access to high-quality, affordable child care, beginning with infants and toddlers. The campaign is concerned with the current workforce crisis facing child care providers and families looking for high-quality care.

Providing Pennsylvania’s 3- and 4-year-olds with access to high-quality, publicly funded pre-k is a cornerstone of early childhood education. High-quality pre-k prepares young children to enter kindergarten ready to succeed. Through the state’s current publicly funded pre-k programs, Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts, and the Head Start Supplemental Assistance Program, eligible families can enroll their children in high-quality programs to help set them on a path to success. However, access to high-quality, publicly funded pre-k is limited, and not every eligible 3- and 4-year-old in the state has an opportunity to participate. This lack of access can place some children behind their peers and with the challenge of trying to catch up once they enter the K-12 system. Only 65,970 eligible children attend high-quality, publicly funded pre-k*, while more than 100,000 eligible children are unserved. That means 61% of eligible children are missing an opportunity to realize the educational and social benefits that high-quality pre-k provides.

Access to high-quality, publicly funded pre-k makes a significant difference in the lives of Pennsylvania’s 3- and 4-year-olds by providing them with the opportunity to enter school ready to succeed. The most extensive pre-k program in the state, Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts, was adopted as Act 45 to the Public School Code in July 2007, making 2022 its 15th anniversary.

After a year-long planning project co-lead by PPC and the Pennsylvania Association for the Education of Young Children (PennAEYC), this report is a culmination of months of interviews and focus groups with interested stakeholders, a national analysis of early intervention work in other states, and a review of data and current practices in Pennsylvania’s early intervention system.

High-quality, publicly funded pre-kindergarten is necessary for preparing our 3- and 4-year-olds to enter kindergarten ready to learn. Pennsylvania’s record is commendable for showing a strong, bipartisan commitment to investing in pre-k over nearly 20 years, including recent support for the program during the pandemic, when not all states continued to invest in this area. The level of policymaker support has provided access to thousands of pre-k children in Pennsylvania. However, more work needs to be done as 61% remain unserved, or 101,500 eligible children.

Every child deserves an equal opportunity to a quality educational foundation that will prepare them to learn, grow, and succeed. Use our interactive child care map created for the Start Strong PA campaign to see county, state or house district maps showing the percentage of children under 5 participating in the Child Care Works subsidized child care program who are NOT receiving care in a high-quality program. You can also see school district maps showing the percentage of capacity that is high-quality. After completing your search, you can also print a fact sheet.

Access to high-quality pre-k is a fundamental building block of our state’s education system. In our role as a principal partner of the Pre-K for PA campaign, we annually update this mapping feature to help all Pennsylvanians learn more about this vital early learning experience in their local area. Use it to search by House or Senate district, by school district or county, and a school district map showing the percentage of capacity that is high-quality. After completing your search, you can also print a fact sheet that includes the number of children served, unmet need, the number of high-quality providers and current capacity.

This brief summarizes results from an analysis conducted by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill that includes two studies looking exclusively at Pennsylvania’s Pre-K Counts program, and also highlights recent research from across the country showing the benefits of pre-k, and calls for frequent and independent reviews of the efficacy of the Pre-K Counts program, similar to what is done in other states.

Evidence-based home visiting programs recognize parents are children’s first teachers, but sometimes even parents and others raising children look for help. Far too many of Pennsylvania’s youngest children live in poverty and experience poor education and health outcomes. Voluntary home visiting programs help parents and others raising children with the supports necessary to improve health, safety, literacy and family self-sufficiency. During home visits, nurses or other trained professionals visit with women, families and children – some as early as pregnancy to promote positive birth outcomes – to provide parent education and support, ultimately promoting child health, well-being, learning and development.

The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program strengthens communities by improving outcomes for children and their families. A cornerstone of evidence-based public policy, MIECHV provides funds for developing and implementing voluntary, evidence-based home visiting programs. Programs must meet at least four of six evidence-based benchmarks to satisfy the law’s rigorous requirements for demonstrated effectiveness. MIECHV is an essential source of funding; however, it is set to expire on September 30th. Congress must act to reauthorize MIECHV before this deadline to ensure families across Pennsylvania can continue to receive vital home visiting services. 

Career and technical education (CTE) provides a unique combination of academic, technical, and hands-on skill-building that prepares students to either immediately enter the workforce or better define career plans to enter post-secondary education. Funding for CTE is complex, with several streams from federal, state and local funding. Funding sources vary.

We can learn a great deal from European CTE models, specifically Germany’s system and supporting students and the workforce. Several pieces are adaptable for Pennsylvania’s practices to build a robust CTE system, including improving career exploration and planning by elevating CTE in earlier grades, supporting partnerships between CTE and the business community, and increasing the use of pre-apprenticeship programs. However, we can only be successful with adequate state funding increases for basic education and career and technical education.

This fact sheet highlights current challenges for career and technical education and why we need increased state investments in our state budget’s basic education funding and CTE subsidy lines: to promote greater access to programming, restore the workforce, and boost our state economy.

Career and Technical Education: Setting the Standard in Pennsylvania, explores how CTE funding is structured in other states and makes recommendations for how Pennsylvania can set the standard for education to workforce preparedness, while acknowledging the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2022 State of Children’s Health Report shows the factors that contribute to a child’s likelihood of being uninsured include family income, race and ethnicity, geography, and age. It uses the most recent Census data and examines the role of public health insurance programs as comprehensive coverage options and how Medicaid continues to provide a safety net of coverage during the COVID-19 public health emergency.

Looking beyond statewide numbers is crucial to show how children in Pennsylvania experience access to health insurance differently. See uninsured data for all 67 counties.

Across Pennsylvania, from our rural communities to our urban centers, kids rely on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for their comprehensive health insurance, including more than 1.2 million children enrolled in Medicaid and more than 151,000 children enrolled in CHIP. The three fact sheets in this series show enrollment by Congressional District, State House District and State Senate District.

The 2021 State of Children’s Health Care in Pennsylvania highlights practical policy solutions to ensure all children and moms living in Pennsylvania are eligible to have free or low-cost health care opportunities. We also advocate for those with existing coverage to stay connected without unnecessary gaps in coverage through auto-renewal strategies, updating current mailing addresses, and more extended time frames for continuous coverage.

The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted the lives of kids and families in Pennsylvania, across the country, and the world. In addition to COVID-19, we must not forget to protect our children from other infections that are easily preventable with timely vaccinations. Heading into 2021, pediatric visits remained lower than a typical year and many children missed routine immunizations. That’s why our message is simply encouraging families to get their kids back on schedule before they get back in school by making an appointment with their pediatrician.

This brief highlights maternal and child health policy and practice, specifically, aiming to explore why there are disparities in maternal and child health; what disparities exist, and for whom; and how policymakers and practitioners can promote racial and ethnic equity to improve maternal and child health.

This tool was created to be used by policymakers or advocates in other states to estimate the cost of extending postpartum Medicaid coverage in their state.

Children need access to nutrition for their growing bodies and minds to be healthy and develop as they should. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a critical component in ensuring infants and toddlers, as well as pregnant and postpartum mothers, have access to healthy nutrition. Participation in the WIC program has declined significantly in recent years, and Thriving is committed to reversing that trend with a series of recommendations. By increasing participation in the WIC program, children and families across Pennsylvania will have more access to the nutritional supports they need to thrive.

This data dashboard tracks the Pennsylvania prenatal-to-age-three collaborative’s progress toward increasing the number of low-income infants and toddlers and their families receiving high-quality services by 25% (approximately 44,000) by 2023 and by 50% (approximately 89,000) by 2025. We focus on child care policy, home-visiting, children’s health insurance, lead screening and abatement, child nutrition (WIC), and perinatal health through our collaborative work.

This fact sheet provides a Perinatal Health Equity Agenda that includes steps to take to care for birthing mothers. With over one-third of Pennsylvania’s births paid for by Medicaid1, expanding and enhancing access to high-quality care up to one year after birth is a key strategy for mitigating maternal mortality and morbidity.

This fact sheet highlights maternal mortality rates in PA, racial/ethnic disparities among pregnancy-related deaths, along with Medicaid births broken down by each County.

This fact sheet breaks down the meaning of perinatal depression and anxiety; highlighting it’s impact and recommendations that can be followed to help.

This fact sheet highlights an overview on why health insurance matters for healthy brain development in PA babies and toddlers. In the first few years of life, young children need regular access to health care for their healthy development at a time when their brains are growing most rapidly.

Lead can seriously harm a child’s health and cause well-documented adverse effects such as damage to the brain and nervous system, slowed growth, development and learning and behavior, hearing and speech problems – which can cause lower IQ, decreased ability to pay attention and under-performance in school often requiring special education services.

This fact sheet highlights Pennsylvania’s lead crisis and next steps on ways to make improvements.

This is a fact sheet that highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the Women, Children, and Infants (WIC) Nutrition Program throughout Pennsylvania, including both challenges and positive improvements for clients.

This fact sheet is a high-level overview of the Women, Children, and Infants (WIC) Nutrition Program which also includes feedback from WIC families on areas for improvement to the program.  

This fact sheet highlights an overview of implementing lead remediation practices, and how by investing in children’s health now can prevent Pennsylvania’s children from being exposed to lead and ensure that they are less likely to be involved in the justice system later in life.

WIC is a cost-effective program with proven benefits, however, declining participation has had a substantial impact on Pennsylvania, threatening the program’s ability to ensure children and families thrive.

While the pandemic has hastened progress on issues that existed prior to COVID-19 and has propelled the program forward on long-delayed innovations, these advances must be coupled with strategies to address long-standing barriers to program access and retention.

This overview details the policy areas of focus of Pennsylvania’s prenatal-to-age-three collaborative, which consists of nonprofit, community and state partners across early care and education and maternal and child health interests.

No baby or toddler should go without health insurance, and keeping kids covered is more important than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pennsylvania must do more for our youngest children.

Advocates and providers must work together to educate families and the public about their free or low-cost, affordable options for health insurance through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and encourage policymakers to keep the programs strong.

For children to have the healthiest start possible, they need to be insured as early as possible. By age 3, children should have 12 well-child visits, according to the schedule set by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

These regular, preventive visits to the doctor or pediatrician are important to track a child’s growth and development, to provide immunizations and to identify and address delays or concerns. Sign up for health care coverage today!

Porque?
Los bebes y Los nines pequenos necesitan controles medicos regulares

iEL seguro medico abre las puertas a citas medicas regulares para poder recibir chequeos, vacunas que previenen enfermedades, servicios dentales y mucho mas!
Todo nino merece un comienzo saludable para tener exito en la escuela y en la vida.

Do you know what Pennsylvania looks like when it comes to child welfare, health insurance coverage, educational opportunities and other important measures of child well-being?

To help you get answers, Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children has created the “State of the Child” profile that provides statewide data and information.