New Haven Early Childhood Council's Early Childhood Plan

The New Haven Early Childhood Council has released its Early Childhood Plan with a focus its assets into a coordinated system that provides easy access to high-quality early care and education, consistant and reliable family engagement in children's development and consistent, high-quality child heath services. The plan focuses on children between the ages of 0-8 and uses results-based accountablity as the framework to set clear goals and measure progress. The challenges the city faces include child poverty (of the city's 17,700 children between the ages of 0-8, 10,800 of them, three out of every five, fall into the category of living in a family that earns less than 185% of the federal poverty level, or $40,800 for a family of four); and risk factors such as low levels of parent education, single-parent households and a primary home language other than English. To measure the progress of the plan, the following information will be tracked: the percentage of children at or above proficiency on entry to kindergarten literacy assessments; the percentage of third graders at or above proficiency on the Total Reading portion of the Connecticut Mastery Test; the percentage of births to mothers without a high school diploma or equivalent; the rate of children substantiated as abused or neglected and the percentage of children 0-8 enrolled in HUSKY who receive their well-child visits as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.