joiner mellowness: ?-yush eliminates Early Childhood Mental Health Support Services ...

Piyush strikes again.

This time, the victims are low-income children under the age of 6 who are considered at-risk of developing social, emotional or developmental problems?and 76 state employees who will lose their jobs?while Piyush redirects federal funding for the program to other areas of the state?s budget.

Remember approximately 15 months ago, when Gov. Piyush Jindal announced that he would not seek a $60 million federal grant in early childhood education funding for the state because, he said, the state?s system for early childhood education is ?inefficient? and mired in bureaucracy? ?We need to streamline the governance structure, funding streams and quality standards in our early childhood system,? he said at the time.

Now, Jindal?s latest move is to terminate the Early Childhood Supports and Services mental health program that provides assessment, counseling and case management to young children in low-income families in the parishes of Orleans, East Baton Rouge, Terrebonne, Lafayette, St. Tammany, and Ouachita.

And it should come as no surprise that he would justify this latest budgetary cut by falling back on the old reliable claim that the program is ?inefficient.?

In terms of standard measures of child health and well-being, Louisiana has been ranked 49th or 50th for each of the past 15 years.

Research has demonstrated that poverty is the single greatest threat to a child?s well-being and the percentage of children living in poverty in Louisiana is 27 percent, 50 percent higher than the national average of 18 percent.

Louisiana has experienced minimal success in providing services for the early childhood period. Some of the services cited as essential for helping these children are access to medical care, mental health and social-emotional development, early care and education, parenting education and family support, according to the Maternal and Child Health Bureau?s State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (SECCS) grant (known in Louisiana as BrightStart).

Instead, Jindal has chosen to disembowel the program, effective Feb. 1, explaining that children with intensive needs can seek help from pediatricians, family resource centers or nonprofit groups.
Program proponents, however, have expressed concern that the program?s termination will result in children receiving medication but having to go on waiting lists for therapy or going without altogether.

What?s more, Piyush plans to take the $2.8 million in federal funding the program is scheduled to receive over the next five months and use it elsewhere in the state?s $25 billion budget.

Even worse, Janet Ketcham, executive director of the McMains Children?s Developmental Center in Baton Rouge will now have to scrap plans for a grant for her center. She said she was contending for a grant to collaborate with Early Childhood Support and Services in order to make it easier for parents get their children into speech therapy programs.

?Now I have to withdraw the grant,? she said.

But the biggest irony of all?

At the same time that Piyush was announcing the dismantling of early childhood services, he was jumping on another bandwagon, albeit somewhat late.

While services to address social, emotional and developmental problems were being eliminated, Piyush was announcing the formation of a study committee on school safety nearly a month after the Dec. 14 massacre of 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

And this is the same governor, remember, who turned his back on a $60 million for early childhood education funding. His official mouthpiece, Kyle Plotkin, said that three separate departments had done a thorough analysis of the grant and determined that it was ?the exact opposite approach our state should take to help our kids.?

Fully one-third of the children in Louisiana are living in poverty and applying for a $60 million grant for early childhood education was deemed the opposite approach the state should take to help these kids.

Such is the mindset of this administration.

And we still have three years to go.