New Program Targets Conditions that Cause Child Abuse, Neglect

About eight years ago, local school districts began reporting concerns about children entering pre-K who were not prepared to learn because of social and emotional challenges.

“We were also seeing every year, for the past number of years, a sharp increase in child-abuse and neglect referrals,” said Cori McFarlane, deputy director of Door County Health and Human Services (HHS), “and parents with alcohol and substance-abuse issues and mental-health issues. All those things converged. We needed to find a better way to connect with those parents.”

Door County HHS and community partners began developing a program to connect with parents, either prenatally or when they delivered their baby to make sure the children got off to the best possible start. Three years in the making and modeled after existing programs in Brown and Sheboygan counties, the Welcome Baby program was born. All it lacked were the funds to make it happen, and that money materialized last month.

That’s when the Wisconsin Bureau of Children’s Services approved the Door County Birth to Three Program’s Welcome Baby initiative. The Child and Family Focused Pandemic Recovery Support Grant for $104,729.30 will be enough to get the program up and running for the next three years.

Although the grant supports recovery efforts by strengthening families and building protective factors for families disproportionately affected by COVID-19, the pandemic only exacerbated community issues that had already been identified.

“COVID only made it worse,” McFarlane said. “It increased the isolation for parents and decreased their likelihood to access services.”

The program will allow the department to connect with all first-birth parents – which is an average of 88 births annually during the past five years, out of total births by parents with a Door County address, according to HHS data. In 2021, 235 babies were born to parents with Door County addresses, 106 of those outside the county. 

HHS has resources and programs that support families and children in a variety of ways. Those primary programs are Healthy Families, with a current caseload of 11 families; Cradle to Career (15 families); and Birth to Three (50 families). 

All three programs, however, generally identify challenges and issues once the child is 3 or 4. McFarlane said earlier intervention could decrease the number of child-abuse and neglect issues, and identify earlier those children who have a 25% delay in speech, physical, cognitive and/or emotional development. 

“We wanted to find a way to connect at the very beginning,” McFarlane said.

The way it works is that pregnant women will be screened by local hospital staff and ob-gyn clinics, with the completed screens passed to a family-resource specialist. New, low-risk parents would receive one visit and a packet of information to answer any questions and provide local resources for a variety of services.

“Welcome Baby is for everybody, and the level of intervention depends on the level of risk,” McFarlane said. “This is a universal screening.”

If the screen indicates a higher risk, more intense assessments would be performed, and the family would potentially be linked to a case manager for an existing program. 

“If that referral goes to Healthy Families, for example, they are connected potentially up to when the child is five years old,” McFarlane said. 

First births are a good place to start, McFarlane said, but the department hopes to ramp it up to successive births and also babies born outside the county.

“Right now, we’re starting with babies born at Door County Medical Center, but a lot of Door County residents are using Green Bay,” McFarlane said. “We hope to link with their program over time.”