Arkansas DHS Receives $3.5 million Grant over Five Years to Help Young Children Who Experience Trauma

Janie Ginocchio 1/3/192:49 PM

Funding will go toward training staff, parents, others in early childhood settings

(LITTLE ROCK, Ark.) --- The Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS) Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education (DCCECE) has been awarded a $3.5 million grant from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration on Children & Families that will be used to train staff, parents, and others working with children from birth to 5 years old who have experienced trauma.

“Young children in Arkansas are experiencing trauma at an alarming rate, and it is critically important that we train early childhood staff and others to help children process and overcome these traumas,” said DCCECE Director Tonya Williams. “The early years are a crucial time in childhood development. The more we can to do help these children early in life, the more likely they will have improved outcomes in school and life.”

DCCECE will get the first round of funding for the five-year grant in 2019, and will use it to help streamline the work in Arkansas on “adverse childhood experiences,” which include abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction (alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, mental illness). According to results of the federally-funded National Survey of Children’s Health, 1 in 7 children in Arkansas experience three or more adverse childhood experiences compared to the national average of 1 in 10.

Through the grant, DCCECE will work to educate individuals at the professional and community level on understanding trauma, including the long-term health outcomes of those who experience prolonged toxic stress. DCCECE also will engage others working in this space, collaborating with partners, and examining existing programs to ensure children have the best start in life.

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Janie GinocchioMember

Jane,

I can't speak for DHS, but from my observations there were a number of things that probably contributed to going after this grant:

1. First Lady Susan Hutchinson's interest and advocacy around ACEs.

2. A greater than expected demand from early childhood providers for the new BehaviorHelp Response System, which requires all publicly funded child-care facilities to seek intervention from the state before suspending or expelling a child. It really brought to focus how prevalent ACEs are: "According to the data, foster care and parental divorce topped the list of trauma experienced by the children who were referred for expulsion or suspension. Among the other causes were parental incarceration, parental drug abuse/mental illness, abuse/neglect and domestic violence."

3. Arkansas' ranking as No. 1 in the nation for percentage of children with at least one ACE from the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health.

4. The ACEs Workgroup members' success in raising awareness about ACEs and their impacts on young children.

5. The arrival of Audrey Freshwater, the new Arkansas Better Chance Program director. She came to us from Tennessee and was very active with the Building Strong Brains initiative there. She's a trauma-focused mental health professional, and she is passionate about achieving better outcomes for kids affected by ACEs. She's the one who wrote the grant application for this. We are incredibly lucky this Arkansas native came back home.

The movement building momentum here. This is the fourth ACEs and trauma-informed care focused federal grant that's been awarded in the last six months: the Arkansas Department of Education got a $9 million SAMHSA grant to address student mental health which includes building a state infrastructure for trauma-informed schools, and AFMC, the organization I work for, received two HRSA grants, one to train primary care providers and the other is an opioid response planning grant that specifically focuses on ACEs as a significant root cause.

1/4/199:25 AM