Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children is a strong, effective and trusted voice to improve the health, education and well-being of children and youth in the commonwealth. PPC is statewide, independent, non-partisan and non-profit.
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Public Policy Priorities for the 2017-18 Legislative Session
Our Vision: To make Pennsylvania one of the top 10 states to be a child and to raise a child.
To achieve its vision, PPC seeks substantial gains toward these public policy goals:
Child Welfare
- Take steps to align child welfare funding with desired child and family outcomes.
- Strengthen the response to reports of child abuse and neglect and the services and supports children and families receive to reduce instances of child maltreatment.
- Ensure that all children in foster care receive services and supports that increase their well-being while in placement and increase their chances of becoming part of a permanent family.
- Improve the education outcomes of children involved with the child welfare system.
Early Learning
- Increase the availability of evidence-based home visiting strategies to strengthen families and meet the comprehensive needs of infants and young children at highest risk.
- Monitor investments and policies that support the inclusion of children with developmental delays and disabilities in high-quality early learning programs and provide ongoing supports to parents and providers.
- Ensure the availability of high-quality child care for at-risk children.
- Ensure the health and safety of children in child care settings and improve child care quality.
- Increase the number of children enrolled in publicly funded high-quality pre-k.
- Promote comprehensive Pre-K to K-12 transition policies that emphasize kindergarten readiness and foster relationships between families, teachers, and community partners.
- Ensure the effective operations of OCDEL programs.
Health Care
- Protect against negative changes to Medicaid, CHIP and/or the Affordable Care Act.
- Build on the success of Medicaid and CHIP to ensure every Pennsylvania child is insured.
- Assure that benefit packages for children have appropriate health care benefits to meet their needs.
- Assure that children enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP are appropriately screened and provided with all opportunities for their healthy development.
- Work to improve opportunities to maximize good health through promoting federal and state laws and policies focused on childhood nutrition.
K-12 Education
- Ensure all children receive a high-quality public education that is supported by a rational school funding system, and sustained multi-year commitments that provide schools with the resources needed to maximize student achievement.
- Continue to develop a comprehensive and transparent accountability framework that effectively evaluates the performance of schools and their personnel, while also providing parents with insight on the quality of education their child is being provided.
- Ensure the state’s academic standards continually provide a quality benchmark for defining student proficiency across all grade levels, and support an assessment system that measures student growth, identifies adequacy gaps, and recognizes curriculum and instruction needs.