Department News

REACH targets programs with limited access to state professional development resources and offers training and coaching to manage challenging behaviors and promote social-emotional health.

The project has multiple measures of success; however, the project team’s capacity to REACH is a critical one! We are proud to report that in March 2017, REACH served the following, through TAPP registered workshops:

• 7 counties
• 11 facilities
• ­­140 (unduplicated) participants receiving training, including teachers, directors, other facility staff
• 684—approximate number of children served by these facilities/staff

There were 40 Technical Assistance contacts (e.g. classroom visits, email, text, and phone) to 16 different facilities in 12 cities during March 2017.  These March numbers are pretty typical for this group! Great early childhood education going on in Arkansas!

DFPM RED faculty member Lorraine McKelvey, Ph.D. recently completed work (with other RED team members) on a year-long, grant-funded, study on ACEs impact in Head Start classrooms. Dr. McKelvey’s team has recently submitted a paper to Child Abuse and Neglect highlighting the work done in the study. The study looked at outcomes for ACEs exposed kids based on timing of exposure. The study identified five classes of children:

• Consistently Low (63.8%)
• Decreasing (10.3%)
• High at Age 2 (11.4%)
• Increasing (10.4%)
• Consistently High (4%)

The Consistently Low and Consistently High classes had the most and least optimal development across all domains, respectively. However, the findings for the groups that changed weren’t exactly those expected. For cognitive, language, and physical development, the most proximal ACEs were more robust for predicting child outcomes. For socioemotional health, exposure at any time from one to three to ACEs had negative consequences. As a whole, the team concluded that ACEs screening tools were needed that are both time-sensitive and permit a lifetime report.