Gearing Up for Home Visitation Grants

The home visitation program (officially titled the Affordable Care Act Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program) is designed to disburse $1.5 billion in grants to states over the next five years.  (See this helpful summary from the Center for Law and Social Policy.)

 

These grants are supposed to help states coordinate and deliver services in at least five areas:

The program requires states to create or augment programs that support mothers of babies and toddlers based on models with evidence of success. What qualifies as an evidence-based model? The application says that the Department of Health and Human Services will be publishing its criteria in the Federal Register later this summer.

 

Before determining what their models should look like, states will need to go through several steps. In the application due on July 9, states must show what level of funding they would need to complete a needs assessment, which is essentially a survey of how many families across the state could benefit from the program.

 

Later this month, states will be asked to apply for a second grant, and provide Health and Human Services more specific information about the data they will collect and how they will coordinate with other programs that already require needs assessments, such as Head Start. They must also document whether home-visiting programs are already underway in various places across their state, and what level of quality they provide, as well as whether the state has the capacity to provide counseling and substance abuse treatment. This information is due at the end of the summer, on September 1.

 

Applications will be due in early 2011 for the full home visitation grants. According to HHS, approximately $90 million is expected to be available in fiscal year 2010 to fund 56 grants that would cover a 27-month budget. A base grant of $500,000 will be available for each state, with the final amount determined by a formula that takes into account the number of children in poverty, and the grant dollars currently available under the Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting (EBHV) Program administered by the Children’s Bureau of the Administration for Children and Families. (Seventeen states receive those EBHV grants at the moment.) In mid-August, according to the application instructions, the department will release detailed information on what it expects to see in states’ applications for the full home visitation grants.

 

The program is authorized to run until 2014 as a mandatory spending program. HHS says that it will base the value of forthcoming grants upon “states’ capacity and commitment to improve child outcomes specified in the statute through the implementation of home visiting programs with fidelity to high-quality evidence-based models.”

 

At Early Ed Watch, we are excited to see the home visitation program get started. Let’s hope states will be able to conduct the required assessments of need among their populations. The assessments alone could provide helpful data on the needs of new mothers and their babies – and how far states may need to go to support them.

 

CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this post, we incorrectly said that the program might not be funded if Congress does not appropriate the funds in subsequent years. The funding for home visitation program is in fact mandatory, which means that is guaranteed through the five-year period. Apologies for the error.