This is the first blog in a six part blog series on Children’s Cabinets and integrated supports and services for children.
By Chiara Parisi & Jacob Deitz
Imagine walking into your favorite local restaurant: you are seated at a bare table by your host who describes the evening’s specials, and immediately you are visited by the drink server, followed by the utensil server, then a tablecloth server…finally a server comes to take your food order, and would you like to order a drink? In this scenario, one family or individual is provided overlapping, duplicated, and fragmented services by several employees failing to communicate and collaborate. This would never happen in a restaurant, so why does it happen daily for children and families seeking government services?
It is uncontroversial to say a child’s ability to learn can be affected by poverty, trauma, and other adversities. We also know that academic improvement for vulnerable children is not only theoretically possible, but likely, with the right kinds of support for their physical, mental, and social needs. The Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) has provided a strong public evidentiary basis for these widely shared understandings - essentially that educational success requires understanding and prioritizing the needs of the “whole child.” SoLD has opened the way for more productive conversations about equity by highlighting that the needs of a child cannot be addressed by the education system alone.
Unfortunately, our public systems are largely structured to inhibit the type of coordination necessary to provide comprehensive care. Navigating multiple independent government agencies remains a high barrier to access for people in need of support. Overlap, duplication, and fragmentation of efforts among government agencies is common, causing waste in time and resources. And those agencies often don’t have relationships with schools, the ideal service hubs for children.
To return to our opening metaphor, when it comes to addressing the needs of the “whole child,” the research has given us a good sense of who should be at the table and what should be on the table. Now, we must address how we get it all to the table.
Children’s Cabinets may offer a way to support the development of integrated systems of supports and services. As they currently operate in a variety of states, these governmental bodies work to coordinate policy and practice across various child-serving agencies by bringing together related work, aligning resources, and closing gaps.
Through our work in the Whole Child Equity project, we are fortunate to count among our collaborators the Forum for Youth Investment and the Education Policy and Leadership program at the American University School of Education. The Forum, a leader in advancing Children’s Cabinets, has identified four key roles that Children’s Cabinets play: aligning data, people, evidence, and money. The next four blogs in this series will dive deeply into each of these four roles, drawing heavily from research conducted in partnership with students in education policy at American University.
With scale in mind, this blog series will focus on the role of state level Children’s Cabinets, though certainly Children’s Cabinets are also possible at the county level. Each blog in this series will highlight examples of state-level efforts to advance the integration of services, with a special focus on Kansas, New Mexico, Illinois, and Maryland. The final blog in this series will address the implications of this research for California.
As a California-based organization, the Opportunity Institute is familiar with the peril and promise of governance reform in our state. We are fortunate to have various coordinating bodies and integrated support efforts here, though each focuses on a discrete population or issue - like services for foster youth, special education students, and mental health - or a geographical location, like a single district or county. All of these efforts have yet to take a comprehensive approach to addressing the whole child and serving all students in the state. We believe a Children’s Cabinet could offer a more systemic and streamlined approach to integrated supports and services in California, though, of course, that’s easier said than done. We look forward to exploring these issues with you further in the weeks to come.