A team from UConn’s School of Social Work says a new two-year, $4.3 million contract with the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood expands on a six-year relationship with the state agency to provide significantly more resources for the evaluation and development of critical programs benefitting the state’s youngest residents.

From assessing access to quality child care and current child care market rates to mapping resources in high poverty and low opportunity communities, the work of the OEC-UConn SSW Partnership team impacts programs, policies, and practices that affect children, families, and early childhood professionals around the state.

“Summer of 2023 was a perfect time for us to come on board and begin looking at the initiatives Connecticut put in place using federal American Rescue Plan funds,” says Carrie Gould-Kabler, co-principal investigator and program manager at Innovations Institute in the School of Social Work. “Now we can support the OEC to fine-tune how decisions are being made based on what the data says and, in some cases, refine those data collection processes to better meet their needs.

“We also want to ensure the data and findings are accessible not just to leadership but to programs and providers to say, ‘Here’s your data. What does this mean for you as a program and how could this help support the work that you’re doing,’” she adds.

The OEC-UConn SSW Partnership team expanded this year to include the Parent, Infant, Early Childhood team at Innovations Institute to provide research and programming support in the areas of early childhood behavioral health and the statewide implementation of the Pyramid Model.

Kate Sweeney, co-principal investigator, Innovations assistant extension professor, and co-director of the Parent, Infant, Early Childhood team, says the Pyramid is a national model designed to support early child care and education providers by giving them the skills and competencies needed to bolster social and emotional development for children in their programs.

“We knew this before the pandemic, but even more so during and after COVID, this is a huge reason why providers throughout the educational array say they’re leaving the workforce,” Sweeney says. “They’re saying there are too many behavioral concerns in their classrooms, and they don’t have the skills, knowledge, or ability to manage. It’s detrimental to their own mental health and well-being and causing them to burn out.”

Part of the team’s work is looking at how to help.

“Birth to 5 is such a sensitive and critical developmental period,” says Samantha Lawrence ’17 (CLAS), ’19 MA, ’22 Ph.D., assistant research professor who serves as the Partnership’s research and evaluation lead and co-principal investigator. “It really sets the stage for a child’s developmental trajectory. It’s important that we lay a strong foundation for these children to support their healthy, successful, happy development within their unique contexts.”

As part of their research and evaluation work, the OEC-UConn SSW Partnership team has supported the state in its mission to advance equitable early childhood policies, funding, and programs; support early learning and development; and strengthen the critical role of all families, providers, educators, and communities throughout a child’s life.

Several of the team’s recent projects identified disparities in resource distribution and access for families and early childhood professionals, and highlighted important next steps for research, policy, and practice to address inequities.

“We want to make sure our youngest citizens are thriving and grow up to have the highest capacity they can have, and that includes working with their caregivers and child care providers,” Margo Candelaria, co-principal investigator, Innovations associate research professor, and co-director of the Parent, Infant, Early Childhood team, says. “We want everybody to have a good start in life and that means infusing the systems with supports, so they can be as successful as they can be.”

The UConn team also conducts additional work not funded directly by the Office of Early Childhood, including annual evaluations of an Infant and Early Childhood training for child care providers and three Even Start sites in Connecticut.

The latest contract, which began July 1, comes on the heels of a previous one-year contract that included a buildup of staffing and resources in preparation for this work. The School of Social Work and Office of Early Childhood began working together in 2018.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers, practitioners, and data analysts with backgrounds in social work, geography, developmental psychology, pediatrics, statistics, among other areas, staffs the OEC-UConn Partnership.