Critical Pathways to School Readiness: Implications for First 5 Ventura County Strategic Planning, Funding and Evaluation

UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities. 1100 Glendon Avenue Suite 860, Los Angeles, CA 90024. Tel: 310-794-2583; Fax: 310-794-2728; e-mail: chcfc@ucla.edu; Web site: http://www.healthychild.ucla.edu

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248

Young Children; Strategic Planning; School Readiness; Models; Formative Evaluation; Program Evaluation; Financial Support; Evaluation Methods; Critical Path Method; Literature Reviews; Measurement Techniques; Federal Programs; State Programs; Program Development; Child Welfare; State Agencies; Public Policy; Agency Cooperation; Child Development; Health Programs; Delivery Systems; Accountability; Early Childhood Education

The UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities (CHCFC) has developed the School Readiness Critical Pathways (SRCPs) as an evidence-based conceptual model that links related outcomes and strategies. This helps to organize an array of broad and diffuse evidence regarding the strategies that produce school readiness outcomes for young children, families and communities in order to communicate the First 5 Ventura County "story." It also provides a blueprint for systematically developing a set of recommendations that are designed to help inform the First 5 Ventura County Commission's strategic planning, funding and evaluation efforts. There are six sections to this report: Section I describes how the SRCPs were developed and how to interpret and communicate the basic SRCPs diagram. Section II presents a gaps analysis that compares the SRCPs to First 5 Ventura County's strategic plan in order to make recommendations about how future iterations of the plan can be increasingly aligned with the evidence base. Section III conducts a second gaps analysis that compares the SRCPs to the strategies funded by the Commission in fiscal year 2004-2005 in order to make recommendations about future funding priorities. Section IV draws on the outcomes identified in the critical pathways to prioritize a set of countywide indicators and programmatic performance measures that will be used to assess the contribution of First 5 Ventura County in achieving school readiness outcomes for young children, families, and communities. Section V summarizes the recommendations that are detailed in sections II-IV. Section VI concludes with suggestions on future refinement and uses of the critical pathways. The following are appended: (1) School Readiness Critical Pathways; (2) A Literature Review to Inform the Development of School Readiness Critical Pathways; and (3) Standardized Outcome Performance Measures. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures. Appendix B contains references for literature review.) [This project was made possible through funding and support from the Center for Excellence in Early Childhood Development and First 5 Ventura County.]

ERIC

9

2007

ED496805