There was some good news this week from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) relating to Medicaid and the potential expansion of BadgerCare. That news came on Tuesday when Senators John Erpenbach and Jennifer Shilling both released a Fiscal Bureau memo that re-estimates the potential savings from expanding BadgerCare eligibility. The new...
A new report by the Campaign for Youth Justice, a nationwide initiative focused on removing youth from the adult criminal justice system, demonstrates failures in keeping youth housed in adult prisons safe. Specifically, the report focuses on states’ compliance to the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which provides that youthful...
WCCF has been analyzing the significant decline of children enrolled in the Wisconsin Shares child care subsidy program. This blog looks at two significant trends: Statewide drop in children served: An extraordinary drop overall drop of 13,566 children, a 23% drop from 2009-2014. The smaller the county the greater the drop in children...
Juvenile Justice Geography, Police, Practice, and Statistics (JJGPS) has launched a new, state-specific profile system for exploring information on juvenile justice, providing a more comprehensive and detailed review of individual states. The profile includes information related to six key areas: jurisdictional boundaries, juvenile...
New YoungStar Report The Wisconsin Council on Children and Families (WCCF) has recently completed a policy brief, YoungStar: We’re Turning Five! Five Year Analysis as of July 2015 (here is a link to the full report). The YoungStar child care quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) is a breakthrough policy initiative that has great...
This report is the sixth in a series of WCCF reports tracking the progress of Wisconsin’s YoungStar program, a quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) launched in 2010 to improve the quality of Wisconsin child care programs. YoungStar focuses on children of low-income working families receiving assistance from the Wisconsin Shares...
December 15, 2015 is the deadline to log back on to healthcare.gov before the automatic renewal process commences. If an eligible consumer has not taken action by December 15th in terms of their current health plan purchased through the federal insurance marketplace, the marketplace will automatically renew their current coverage,...
Thanksgiving is the time when we celebrate food and the pleasure of sharing it with family and friends. That makes it a very appropriate time to appreciate that the federal food stamp program provides well targeted assistance to millions of Americans who lack the resources to meet basic food needs. Just in time for Thanksgiving, the...
The Economic Policy Institute just issued a report, Child care workers aren't paid enough to make ends meet. Not startling news to those in the early childhood field, but the data is stunning, and provides Wisconsin-specific information: Some key findings: Child care workers receive very low hourly pay Very few child care workers...
Taxpayers, families, and communities are bearing the cost of Wisconsin’s outdated corrections policies, according to a new report from the Wisconsin Budget Project. Wisconsin residents pay a high price in dollars for Wisconsin’s over-reliance on incarceration. State and local governments in Wisconsin spend 12% more on corrections per...
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