The federal government currently has five primary programs designed to feed school-age children: the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), the School Breakfast Program (SBP), the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the Seamless Summer Option, and the Summer Food Service Program. Each program has distinct meal costs, eligibility requirements, and reimbursement processes for the meals served. While all public schools have the option to participate in each of these federal meal programs, they may choose to opt out of any of them. Recognizing the multitude of benefits for students, families, and schools, this report illustrates how five states—California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota, and New Mexico—have acted to independently serve free school meals for all students. In the absence of continued federal investment, this strategy is essential for ensuring that students are well fed and ready to learn during the school day.

This blogpost summarizes a podcast, “Child Support – A Tool to Enable Families and Their Children to be Food Secure,” which included interviews with the National Child Support Enforcement Association, the Food Research & Action Center, and the Maine Department of Human Services. It highlights the positive impact of child support programs under the Office of Child Support Enforcement, and notes the ways that SNAP offers short- and long-term benefits for infant and child health and well-being. The blogpost also links to the full podcast.

This report is an initial evaluation of Families Forward, a locally designed and funded two-generation program in Bangor, Maine. The program involves a partnership with Bangor Housing, the local public housing authority, and the Boys & Girls Club of Bangor. The program’s model includes social supports for families, financial coaching, and access to services and training that are designed to move these families toward greater economic mobility.

This report, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and other organizations, suggests how state policy makers in Maine could reform the child welfare or juvenile justice system for youth. It presents national research that identifies how a full continuum approach – covering prevention to reintegration – could help youth successfully transition to adulthood.

Mathematica Policy Research issued three new briefs to document lessons learned from implementing the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), which educates youth on abstinence and contraception. These briefs are part of a multi-component evaluation on PREP that Mathematica is conducting for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. One brief focuses on a teen pregnancy prevention program in rural Kentucky, another details a boys-only teen pregnancy prevention program in Iowa, and the third brief examines how California, Maine, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina developed infrastructure to support PREP programming. Each brief includes findings on how PREP implementation differed at each site.

This report documents the implementation infrastructure of Personal Responsibility Education Program evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs in four states--California, Maine, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Analysis of the programs implementation infrastructure showed that the four states differed in size; the role grantees took in supporting implementation, resources, and the settings in which the program operated. Despite that, states had similarities in how they:

• worked with providers before and in the early stages of implementation;
• formed a pool of qualified trainers to train program facilitators and provide ongoing technical assistance;
• went beyond federal performance measures requirements; and
• established communication and feedback loops to facilitate data gathering, data sharing, and identification of lessons learned. (author abstract)

The Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Office for Family Independence (OFI) and the New Hampshire Division of Family Assistance convened a peer-to-peer site exchange funded by the Welfare Peer TA Network in Concord, New Hampshire to (1) provide cross-site networking between the two States; (2) foster dialogue on strategies for improving work participation among TANF participants; (3) discuss strategies for data collection methodologies that improve the calculation of work participation rates; and (4) share dialogue on strategies for integrating education and training opportunities into TANF programming. The site visit included discussions with program, data, and administration staff and a series of site visits to the New Heights Data Management Center and the Combined Services/Community Action Program. During this peer-to-peer exchange, Maine learned about the collection, analysis, and reporting methodologies New Hampshire uses to achieve its work participation rate and to improve the overall data-driven philosophy of their local TANF program.