States Paying Attention to 7 ‘Evidence-Based’ Home Visiting Programs

It’s been just over a year since Congress passed historic health care legislation, and as many early childhood observers know, the law came with a boost for low-income pregnant mothers, infants and toddlers: It authorized a $1.5-billion, five-year federally funded program that would help pay for the expansion of home visiting programs to assist those mothers in raising their children.

States are now engaging in the nitty-gritty work of determining how they will distribute the federal funding for this program across multiple agencies and organizations within their states — while still staying within the federal guidelines. One of the most important stipulations is that states must use these federal dollars to support “evidence-based” programs — or, in layman’s words, programs that have been shown to make a positive impact.

In a funding notice on February 8, the Health Resources and Services Administration and the Administration for Children and Families provided guidelines for what an “evidence-based” program should look like. They listed seven programs that measure up:

1. Early Head Start
2. Family Check Up
3. Healthy Families America (HFA)
4. Healthy Steps
5. Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY)
6. Nurse-Family Partnership
7. Parents as Teachers

States are expected to submit their plans to the Health Resources and Services Administration from May 9 through June 8 (90 to 120 days from the issuance of the February 8 notice). Here at the Early Education Initiative, we are interested in hearing details of state plans to integrate these home visiting programs within a birth-through-third-grade system of early learning. Let us know if this is something that you or people within your state have been trying to tackle.

Note: The National Conference of State Legislatures is holding a webinar on this topic on Friday, April 1st. More information about the timeline for submission of state applications, as well as the history of the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program can be found on their web pages as well as those maintained by the Center for Law and Social Policy.