Editor’s note: This commentary is by Debra Gass, who is the executive director of Brattleboro Town School District’s Education Services, a Vermont Parent Child Center, Head Start and Early Head Start program serving Windham County families.
[P]revention work saves money. Research proves that focusing on prevention is a far more effective use of resources to ensure children reach their full potential than treating the effects of abuse after it has occurred. Every dollar invested in building healthy families and communities reduces the demand on our health care system and helps to ensure that more people will be healthier for longer periods in their lives. When families are supported, children are less likely to be at risk for child maltreatment and more likely to grow up happy and healthy.
Adverse childhood experiences are a hand that nobody should ever be dealt. Yet, many Vermonters have experienced more than one of these harmful experiences. parent child centers were a remarkable innovation when they were first created nearly 30 years ago, and they are still on the cutting edge of prevention work with vulnerable families. Parent child centers have a two-generation approach that helps parents to deal with their own adverse childhood experiences and also to change the game for their children, so those children are not dealt the same hand. The work that parent child centers do helps families to cope successfully with both the timeless challenges of all families with young children and the new challenges of the 21st century. Parent child centers prevention programs and services help to keep children with their families and safe, bend the curve on rising health care costs, and promote healthy child development and access to quality early care and education.
As policy makers make tough budget choices this year, we hope they will keep parent child centers in the forefront.
Parent child centers across the state are focused on an effort to secure more state funding for our new master grant. The grant is currently funded at approximately $2 million, and parent child centers conducted an analysis about market rate pay scales and have discovered that to bring our current staff to market rate pay and benefits, we will need an additional $8 million to our master grant. This increase will greatly impact our ability to retain staff and provide continuity of prevention programs and services for Vermont’s vulnerable families. Our strength-based, relationship-focused framework is what research shows works best to bring positive life changes to vulnerable families. This approach saves Vermont taxpayers millions of dollars.
As policy makers make tough budget choices this year, we hope they will keep parent child centers in the forefront. Please support our work to strengthen Windham County families by encouraging our legislators to honor our request for an additional $8 million to be distributed among all 15 parent child centers in our master grant.
