Assessing Models of Coordinated Services: A Scan of State and Local Approaches to Coordinating Early Care and Education with Other Health and Human Services

To promote children’s healthy development and give them opportunities to flourish, families need a wide range of support services. These services are often disconnected from each other. Early care and education (ECE) has a particularly fragmented system (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2018). Systems with conflicting or duplicative processes and requirements, such as separate enrollment processes that ask families to give the same information to multiple providers, place a burden on families—a burden that can be particularly hard on those in crisis (Adams and Heller 2015; Adams et al. 2015; Cavadel et al. 2017).

A growing number of states and localities are working to address the many needs of families living in poverty by coordinating their services and funding streams. Recently, for example, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Preschool Development Grant Birth-to-Five (PDG B–5) program awarded funding to states and territories to plan and design a statewide coordinated system of care for young children and their families.

To improve understanding of approaches to coordinating ECE with other health and human services, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) sponsored the Assessing Models of Coordinated Services (AMCS) project. This report shares findings from a national scan of existing state and local coordinated services approaches.