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Taxpayers, families, and communities are bearing the cost of Wisconsin’s outdated corrections policies, according to a new report from the Wisconsin Budget Project.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...
On this date in 1989, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). As Oma Vic McMurray points out in a letter in the Capital Times today, the U.S. played a large role in drafting the provisions of the convention. Yet 26 years after it was adopted by the UN, the United States is the only...
For well over a decade, trends in Wisconsin's key juvenile justice numbers have followed the national trends by continuing to decline. That trend continued through 2014 in which there were fewer juvenile arrests (only about 1/3 the number in 2002), a lower juvenile arrest rate (less than ½ of what it was in 2005), and fewer youth...
Borrowing from Jeff Butts, the notion that there is no such thing as a “magic birthday” struck me when I read that Governor Malloy of Connecticut announced a new initiative to look at reforming the justice system for 18 to 24 year olds. Recall that Connecticut recently raised the age of adult jurisdiction from 16 to 17 and then 17 to 18...
Cleveland, Ohio has one of the worst lead problems in the nation…it also has one of the highest crime rates. A recent news series in Cleveland is now presenting the overwhelming evidence that these two issues are connected. The link between childhood lead exposure and crime has long been established, evidenced by research in multiple...
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