the police if they feel that a police patrol near the home is advisable later on. The policy and protocol should be shared with parents as well.Crisis Planning and Management Policy
How does a teacher with twenty children respond when she observes that a child is suddenly lashing out violently at his classmates for no apparent reason? What does she do when a child, during class, reports that her brother was shot the night before?
When a crisis occurs, it is distressing not only for the child, but also for classmates and teachers who often feel helpless and afraid. Today, staff needs to be prepared to deal with a wide range of crises-from a child changing placement, to the incarceration of a parent, or the death of a family member or friend.
Local grantees will be better prepared for sudden, troubling events, however, if they develop a thoughtful and organized crisis policy. This policy, and the crisis plan, should draw upon the strengths and capacities of different staff members. It should also be supportive of the needs of both students and faculty.
A crisis plan has a number of benefits for children, staff, and parents. These include:
· Promoting a collaborative and comprehensive approach that ensures the children's physical safety and emotional well-being;
· Providing teachers with the knowledge that the program will provide the support needed during a crisis; and
· Providing opportunities for families to access needed services from community agencies.You can develop a shared understanding by providing an open forum that allows staff, managers, and Policy Council members to express their concerns about the programs' capacity to handle crises. These crises might include family members abusing alcohol and other drugs; shifts in foster care placement; witnessing family or community violence; child abuse and neglect; death or serious illness of a family member; and homelessness.
· Focused training can help all staff to recognize warning signals that a child is in crisis; to support both the child in crisis and other children in the classroom; and to facilitate consultations and referrals to outside agencies. With staff and Policy Council members, brainstorm procedures that could be followed in handling different types of crises. You may discover that procedures and contact people vary according to the type and severity of the crisis. Intervention may involve observing and talking to the child, talking to the parents, or contacting the appropriate agencies (e.g., health care providers, emergency assistance and social service agencies, law enforcement personnel, or the State department of youth services; if necessary).
· The Policy Council, fostering a discussion with the staff, can identify different crises that the program has encountered or might encounter. These can be ranked according to severity. High light those that would require immediate attention, and discuss the best way to handle each. Specific procedures to be followed will vary according to the type and severity of crisis, as will the contact people (e.g., health care providers, emergency assistance and social service agencies, law enforcement personnel). It should provide Head Start staff with a rationale for reporting crises and a summary of pertinent laws and regulations; help staff to identify the people who should be contacted when a crisis occurs; and suggest the types of information that is required, as well as the reporting procedures that are involved. In addition, the policy should include a protocol for working with the child's family and the child's teacher. With your staff, check periodically to evaluate how the crisis plan is working, and to identify loopholes and areas that still need to be worked out. The checklist in Exhibit 4 can help you plan to respond to the crises you cannot prevent.PROMOTE INTERAGENCY COLLABORATION
Identify Potential Partners
As the needs of families and children in communities change, Head Start programs need to identify and form connections with a broader range of agencies. Exhibit 5 offers a worksheet that you can use to identify relevant community resources. It includes an expanded list of agencies in education, health and mental health, social services, law enforcement, and criminal justice with which the Head Start program might form linkages. Various agencies can be sources of information, referrals, services, and/or training expertise. Along with data from the Community Needs Assessment and Family Needs Assessment, use the worksheet to note specific local agencies, identify contact people in each, and specify next steps to take toward collaboration.
Open a Dialogue with Other Agencies
Head Start is comprehensive-serving families as well as children; focusing on health, social services, and education; and including children with disabilities as well as normally developing children. More than most community agencies, therefore, it carries an institutional understanding of the importance of interagency linkages. As Head Start programs interact with new community partners, they can apply proven strategies to these new relationships.
To foster common awareness among agencies, directors report that they:
· Hold a Head Start luncheon to "break bread together" once or twice a year;
· Invite all the agencies to visit the program and talk about their interests and expertise;
· Join a community planning council;
· Join with the LEA and other agencies to sponsor a community fair that features different community organizations;
· Plan or participate in a forum for Head Start teachers and managers to gain an overview of resources available within the community and outline procedures for facilitating referrals and consultations;
· Participate on a panel of speakers that includes representatives from community agencies, where each panelist describes their organization, the types of services provided, how referrals are made, and how they have worked with Head Start in the past;
· Join forces with other early childhood programs, schools, and professional organizations in the area to offer collaborative training;
· Serve on local and statewide advisory councils; and
· Partner staff and parents to interview local community agencies and prepare a parent-initiated and designed community resource booklet.Promote Head Start's Contributions
Once key people in community agencies know you, collaboration can take many forms. Joining with other community agencies, Head Start can:
· Build reciprocal referral systems;
· Provide or access services to support the health and development of Head Start children;
· Access services to support the health and development of vulnerable parents and other caregivers;
· Offer employee assistance programs to staff;
· Provide training and technical assistance to staff;
· Define community needs or help define the needs of a specific program;
· Plan service delivery strategies that are more integrated and less redundant;
· Forge a coalition to effect community change; and
· Write coalition-based grants for specific projects or services.Develop Written Interagency Agreements
Formal, written agreements that spell out institutional relationships are the best way to ensure that reciprocal arrangements will continue over time. Otherwise, shifts in key personnel in one agency or the other can weaken or dissolve the agreement. Written interagency agreements usually include:
·An overview of the mission or purpose of each organization;
·A description of the purposes of the interagency agreement;
·Procedures that describe specific ways people will work together;
·A discussion of eligibility criteria, types of services offered, and timelines, as well as access to transportation;
·A discussion of the referral process: how referrals are made and by whom, and the steps that are involved in the feedback loop;
·Information about cost-sharing for joint services (e.g., screening, classrooms staffed by LEA and Head Start personnel, and training); and
·Mechanisms for handling interagency disputes.Interagency collaboration between Head Start and LEAs began as a way to describe which services each program would provide to children with disabilities. Interagency agreements with LEAs, important as they are, are not the only option. Reciprocal arrangements with other kinds of agencies may prove equally valuable, and at the same time require different definitions of reciprocity.
Treatment centers, for instance, may provide Head Start with intervention services, support groups, and individual and family therapy. Many treatment centers are privately funded, relying heavily on third-party payment or direct payment. Other treatment centers rely on multiple streams of funding: State contracts, federal grants, and fees for services. All treatment centers have an incentive to fill treatment slots. Head Start can represent a source of referrals to an agency If you agree to provide a certain number of referrals over a year, for example, the treatment center may be willing to treat some of your cases pro bono, treat other cases on a sliding scale, or provide a consultant to conduct staff training.
CASE 4: Working With Migrant Families
Lessons For Head Start At LargeThe following case illustrates the types of situations that Head Start staff and managers have en countered in serving children who have been affected by family substance abuse. The case content is real, but the names have been changed. Questions for the management team are included to guide the reader's thinking and suggest links to situations in local programs.
"Migrant farm worker families involved with substance abuse present a special challenge to Head Start," says the health/disabilities specialist at the Migrant Head Start Resource Center. "The families are highly mobile. Often they live in communities for very short periods of time-they may relocate to different areas each year, depending on weather, the crop conditions, the local farm labor supplies. Service delivery is very difficult during working hours, because losing time from work means people lose the income they need for basic necessities. In the evenings, family members who've worked in the fields for twelve hours are tired, they may not be reachable by phone, they may have to rely on crew leaders or others for transportation. And migrant families live and work in rural areas, where services are few and far between anyway.
"Factors other than logistics keep migrant families separate from the communities. Culturally diverse, often non-English speaking, they frequently feel like outsiders. They are often looked upon as outsiders, too, with many State and local agencies unwilling to accept responsibility for serving migrants and their families.
"Yet we do see some positive steps. Take the Gomez family, for instance. Every spring they drive north from their home in Texas to live and work harvesting vegetables on large, privately owned farms. They stay 'upstream' for about four months, as different vegetables ripen and must be picked, then follow the migrant stream further north to another community, where they stay two months, before going home to Texas. There are now Migrant Head Start programs in all three locations where they live. Mr. Gomez' s goal in life is to provide the very best for his wife and three young children. Increasingly frustrated, though, he's become depressed and started drinking; sometimes he's violent.
"As Mrs. Gomez became preoccupied with her husband and his moods, she began to go next door to see her friend Mrs. Farias for a drink in the evening.
"One night, at a Migrant Head Start Center meeting, she heard people talk about substance abuse as a family issue. One woman was worried about her husband; he was drinking so much and he was so tired in the daytime that his work was suffering. Another woman was worried because her teenage son was spending all his time with teenagers known to be heavy drinkers. Mrs. Gomez remained silent. She didn't want to raise her concerns about her husband's drinking for fear their family reputation would suffer. And she would never say anything about her own drinking; women in her culture who drink are not thought of highly. But she listened intently, and when the coordinator asked how many parents would like to see substance abuse as one topic for the program to address during the season, she raised her hand.
"The Migrant Head Start program scheduled weekly support groups for parents. They weren't able to locate a bicultural, bilingual substance abuse specialist in their own community, but they found one in the nearest large city-sixty miles away-working with a project funded to serve Hispanic families in crisis. She agreed to assist two evenings a month, for a nominal fee to cover gas and other expenses. She also agreed to provide over-the-phone support in developing a program for the children while their parents attended meetings.
"The grantee could not locate a community program interested in working with them to serve migrant families, other than the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA had no Spanish-speaking members but did agree to help Migrant Head Start establish twice-weekly meetings. On the specialist's suggestion, program staff contacted the State agencies responsible for substance abuse, both in the State where the families would move to next and in their home base community in Texas. They obtained the names of Al-Anon groups with at least one Spanish-speaking member in the next locations, and gave them to the families. They obtained the correct written permission from the families and transferred confidential but important information to appropriate Migrant Head Start personnel in the next location. Later on, if families wished to transfer the information to other service providers, they could do so.
"Finally, the grantee contacted the other Migrant Head Start programs in their stream to let them know what they were doing in the area of substance abuse and to offer their assistance in developing similar services for families. The program also plans to work with substance abuse service providers in their local communities and at the State level, to make providers more aware of the needs of migrant farm workers and to advocate for better services and a more receptive attitude among the services that presently exist.
"Mrs. Gomez? As a result of the weekly sessions, she learned about co-dependence, as well as addiction. She realized that she must focus on caring for herself and her children. While being supportive of her husband, she could not solve his problems for him. She learned methods of disengaging and coping; she visits her friend next door less and less often, as her focus returns to herself and her children. She did tell her husband about the meetings. He was not interested in attending, but he did admit that his drinking was becoming a problem-especially after he learned that a good friend of his attended a couple of the meetings. Mrs. Gomez hopes that in time her husband will face his problem squarely.. and when that time comes, she hopes that there will be someone available who can help him."
QUESTIONS FOR THE MANAGEMENT TEAM -What similarities do you see between your program and the challenges facing the Migrant Head Start program?
- In what ways do you see Head Start acting as the "linking" agency in your service area, taking the lead in bringing services together?
-Which families are seen as "outsiders" in your community? Why? What could you do to change these attitudes where they exist among your own staff? Among other families in your community? Among service providers?
-What changes would you advocate for in your local community and at the State level?