Here are a few key highlights from the federal budget that passed in late December: Preschool Development Grants were restored to $250 million (this is third year funding for the 18 states that previously won preschool development or expansion grants). Head Start was funded at $9.168 billion, an increase of $570 million from the...
The latest quarterly report from the Department of Health Services (DHS) has some very good news on Wisconsin’s Medicaid budget. The report released yesterday projects that the state share of Medicaid spending will be $72.6 million less than previously expected over the course of the current biennium. The substantial savings in state...
I thought our readers would be interested in a new policy brief on continuity of care. The policy brief, The Importance of Continuity of Care: Policies and Practices in Early Childhood Systems and Programs, includes a section on research detailing the importance of continuity of care and an analysis of state policies and programming...
A recently released report from the Sentencing Project, Declines in Youth Commitments and Facilities in the 21st Century, summarizes the dramatic declines in youth confinement that have occurred across the country over the last decade or so. This is not news to those who have followed the trends of dramatic declines in juvenile arrests...
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...
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