More Accomplishments (continued)
Prevention Task Force
The Prevention Task Force issued a report in August 2018 identifying five strategies for advancing child abuse prevention in Texas. They were:
- Developing a community tool kit to empower communities.
- Exploring the financial potential of the children’s trust fund and other financing opportunities for communities.
- Developing a prevention framework.
- Elevating early brain development.
- Expand prevention programming.
The task force held three meetings during Fiscal Year 2019 to develop two of their five recommendations: the community tool kit and elevating early brain development.
The Task Force created an outline for a community toolkit that consists of resources to support communities in their collaborative efforts to prevent child abuse and neglect and promote positive outcomes for children. DFPS started production on the toolkit in FY 2019 and it will be published in FY 20 in a web-based format for communities in various stages of implementing collaborative efforts to use.
During Fiscal Year 2019, DFPS partnered with the Department of State Health Services, the University of Texas System, Casey Family Services, and the Episcopal Health and St. David’s foundations to host a two-day Pediatric Brain Health Summit. Due to the success of the first summit and the Task Force’s continued emphasis on elevating early brain development, DFPS began convening monthly workgroups in late 2019 to plan for the second Summit.
Due to the legislative increases in funding for two of PEI’s programs, PEI was able to implement the task force’s recommended strategy to expand prevention programming using its data-driven, risk-based growth strategy as discussed earlier in this report.
The Prevention Task Force was dissolved (Legislative Sunset) on August 31, 2019.Provider Feedback
In Fiscal Year 2019, PEI used feedback gathered through its 2018 Spring Listening Tour to improve and streamline its work with communities. The community input encouraged PEI to reassign early childhood program specialists by communities instead of program so communities with multiple PEI early childhood programs would have one program specialist. This helps to improve relationships between PEI staff and contractors and streamline the communication process, to help ensure families get the services they need.
In April 2019, PEI hosted a two-day focus group to gather specific input from providers on the launch of the expanded Prevention and Early Intervention Reporting System (PEIRS) database. These sessions allowed home visitor staff and other PEI contractors and stakeholders to learn about upcoming changes to the PEIRS system and offer their input regarding how to make it more useful and efficient.