Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Urban League's Leadership Dinner

Monday, December 06, 2004

More than 700 people filled the ballroom of the Westin Convention Center Hotel Friday night for the Urban League's ninth annual Ronald H. Brown Leadership Banquet. They came to celebrate the contributions in civic leadership of Oliver Byrd, the driving force behind the Africa American Cultural Center; the community leadership of Leon Haynes III, founding director of Hosana House, Wilkinsburg; the corporate leadership of Marva Harris, retired Community Reinvestment Act officer at PNC Bank and to give posthumous recognition to Dr. Robert Kisner, the region's second black ob-gyn and a champion of family planning and better health care for African-American and poor women.

The event took place on the eve of Esther Bush's 10th anniversary as president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Urban League. She noted that the organization's programs have touched some 400,000 people in that time, despite a $1 million funding cut in the past two years. And she revealed that the chapter soon would be receiving a $500,000 grant to develop training and employment opportunities for young adults, ages 18 to 21.

Many longterm stalwarts of the organization were on hand to hear Gov. Ed Rendell's videotaped congratulations and Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato's praise from the stage, including past chapter leaders Leon Haley, David Epperson and Art Edmunds. Also present were board chair Victor Roque with Marcia, former chair Glenn Mahone with Andrea, emcee Harold Hayes, Mike Doyle, Jim Ferlo, Tawanda Carlisle, Sala Udin, Evan and Brenda Frazier, Gayle Moss, Tim Stevens, Ron and Judy Davenport and Lynn and Ron Davenport Jr., Marcia Martin, James and Doris Carson Williams, Milt and Nancy Washington, Yvonne Cook, Pam Golden, Willette and Eddie Edwards, Bill Trueheart and Carol Word, George and Janet Miles, the PG's Edwina Kaikai, Ronnie and Sandra Bryant, David and Wendy Barensfeld, William Kisner Sr. and Jr. and Dr. Morris Turner, who accepted for Dr. Robert Kisner. Among the young professionals in attendance were Thomas Reynolds, Linda Cuttler, Jada Beaufford, Crystal Lloyd, Ondrea Burton, Evan Frazer, Warner Macklin III and Tracey McCants-Lewis.

A Medal for Strickland

Bill and Rose Strickland traveled to Greensburg Friday evening to pick up yet another feather for his cap: the ribbon-strung Gold Medal annually awarded by the Westmoreland Society, a fund-raising arm of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.

Presenters Martha Perry and JoAnne Boyle advised that Strickland merited the honor for his impact on the arts via his work at the Manchester Bidwell Corp. on the North Side. Ably catered by Bob Sendall/All in Good Taste, this black-tie gathering also featured a vote to add both an Austin C. Wooster still life and prints by Otto Kuhler and Harry Sternberg (combined cost: $19,775) to the museum's permanent collection.

Attendees included Henry and Elsie Hillman, Diana Jannetta, Harvey Childs, Harley Trice and Lea Simonds, Jack and Anne Robertshaw, Chuck and Trudy Booth, Art Boyle, Richard and Sande Hendricks, Anita Manoli and daughter Ann Ruddy, and the museum's director, Judith O'Toole, with Kevin.

Hope Has A Home

Darryl Strawberry is an imposing figure, a tall and commanding presence who immediately arrests the attention of all who enter a room in which he is holding court. But on Thursday night, it was the former baseball star's story of drug addiction and recovery that captivated guests at the annual Hope Has a Home gala at the Hilton Pittsburgh.

Strawberry came to town with his lovely wife, Charisse, to share their story of pain and redemption, and at the same time raise money for youth programs at Gateway Rehabilitation Center, a nonprofit drug and alcohol treatment effort in Western Pennyslvania. Among the 400 attending the $150-a-plate soiree were honorary chairs Richard and Janice Pagliari, Dr. Abraham Twerski and Dr. Gail Bessler Twerski, Bill and Linda Roemer, Ed and Karen Linder, Paul and Ann Bridges, Jack and Eleanor Schano Feeney, Jim Rogal, Bob and Carol Carter, Richard and Jessica Galardini, Annemarie Hoffman, Paul Maloney and Dr. Ken and Pamela Ramsey.

Make-A-Wish Sports Carnival

Competition was fierce for giant Shrek or Spiderman figures, but there were plenty of prizes to go around at the Make-A-Wish Sports Carnival Saturday at UPMC Sportsworks at Carnegie Science Center. The place was jumping, literally, as hundreds of kids and parents tried their skill at assorted challenges between bites of a buffet dinner. Dan Drawbaugh (wih Susan) and Dan Griffin (with wife Marian Vanek and son Sean) co-chaired the benefit, and the 16th Annual Bryan P. McClintock Award was presented to Bill Strickland, president and CEO of Bidwell Training Center and Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, for his continued support and services to the children of Make-A-Wish.

In the crowd were Make-A-Wish Foundation president Judith Stone, Rose Strickland, board chair Sandy Aderson with Leslie, Frank and Erica Zappala, Tim and Beth Eckenrode, Susie and Bill Johnson, Ron Violi, Robert Cindrich, Chip and Robin Kamin, Wayne and Ann Berger, Carl and Marlene Cooper, Dr. Richard Kasdan and Mark and Rebecca Lando.

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Copyright ©1997-2004 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

PA PowerPort

EDITOR'S NOTE: Listed below are the Stakeholder Committee members:

Allegheny County

Carmen Anderson, program officer, The Heinz Endowments, Pittsburgh.

Dr. Robert Cicco, Pediatric and Neonatal Associates, Pittsburgh.

Hon. Kim Clark, supervising judge, Family Division-Juvenile Section, Pittsburgh.

Leon Haynes, director, Hosanna House, Inc., Wilkinsburg.

Liz Healy, parent and advocate, Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, Pittsburgh.

Dr. Robert Nelkin, director of policy initiatives, University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development, Pittsburgh.

Berks County

Wendy Luckenbill, parent and coordinator, Pennsylvania Collaboration for Youth, Womelsdorf.

Cathy Palm, publisher, Advocate's Agenda, Bernville.

Bucks County

Dr. Frances Barnes, superintendent, Palisades School District, Ottsville.

Lee Rush, executive director, justCommunity Inc., Perkasie.

Centre County

Norma Keller, Centre County Youth Service Bureau, State College.

Hon. Donna D. Gority, Blair County commissioner, Hollidaysburg.

Dr. Mark T. Greenberg, director, Prevention Research Center, Department of Human Development and Family Services, University Park.

Dauphin County

Joan Benso, president and CEO, Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, Harrisburg.

Terry Casey, executive director, Pennsylvania Child Care Association, Harrisburg.

Daniel Elby, executive director, Alternative Rehabilitation Communities, Inc., Harrisburg.

Larry Gardner, president/CEO, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of the Capital Region, Harrisburg.

Sandra Peck, parent, Dauphin.

Ilene W. Shane, executive director, Pennsylvania Protection and Advocacy, Inc., Harrisburg.

Erie County

Maureen Barber-Carey, executive vice president, Dr. Gertrude A. Barber Center, Inc., Erie.

Lancaster County

Robert Haigh, president, Lancaster Osteopathic Health Foundation, Lancaster.

Alice M. Yoder, director, Community Health, Lancaster General Hospital, Silver Spring.

Lehigh County

Paulette Hunter, parent, Allentown.

Patricia W. Levin, Community Services for Children, Allentown.

Luzerne County

Dr. Dennis Gourley, executive director, Family Service Association of Wyoming Valley, Dallas.

Joseph De Vizia, president, Children's Service Center, Wilkes-Barre.

Philadelphia County

Jeannie Kim Carpenter, director, Primary Care Services, Children's Hospital, Philadelphia.

Cynthia Corbin, St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, Philadelphia.

Gloria Guard, president, People's Emergency Center , Philadelphia.

Rev. Geneva Hackett, Impacting Your World Ministries, Philadelphia.

Frazierita Klasen, Pew Charitable Trust, Philadelphia.

Lynne McDivit, Family Advocacy coordinator, Philadelphia.

Andrew Pack, executive director, Variety Club - Helping Children with Disabilities, Philadelphia.

Nick Torres, Congresso de Latinos Unitas, Philadelphia.

Shelly Yanoff, executive director, Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth, Philadelphia.

Potter County

Honorable John B. Leete, president judge, 55th Judicial District, Coudersport.

Ellen Shinn, Potter County Human Services, Roulette.

Snyder County

Ellen DeDomenico, human services director, Lycoming-Clinton Counties Joinder Board and president, Pennsylvania Association of County Human Services, Selinsgrove.

Union County

Dr. Robert G. Witten, executive director, Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit, Lewisburg.

The Evaluation Exchange
Volume IX, No. 3, Fall 2003

Issue Topic: Evaluating Community-Based Initiatives
Promising Practices
Alternative Designs for Community-Based Research:
Pittsburgh’s Early Childhood Initiative
Stephen Bagnato, Robert Grom, and Leon Haynes describe an evaluation design for Pittsburgh’s Early Childhood Initiative that provides scientific rigor in a community setting.

Little agreement exists about how evaluations of social intervention programs should be conducted. Traditional social scientists argue for the use of laboratory-based, control group, randomized designs as the gold standard, but this approach lacks generalizability to real-life settings. Alternative evaluation designs are necessary to document the elements of intervention programs that predict outcomes in natural community settings. Yet critics charge alternative methods with a lack of experimental rigor.1 An evaluation approach known as authentic assessment and program evaluation research meets the demand for rigor while addressing the community setting context.

Pittsburgh’s Early Childhood Initiative
In 1994, as part of the Early Childhood Initiative (ECI), the Heinz Endowments organized the business, corporate, agency, and foundation sectors in Pittsburgh to expand quality early care and education programs and options for unserved children in high-risk neighborhoods. The overarching mission of ECI is to foster preschool and school success for children of poverty, whose typical retention and special education placement rates in kindergarten have ranged between 18% and 40%.

A consortium of business, community, and foundation leaders designed the goals, approach, and expected outcomes of ECI. This design was based on seven core features of successful early childhood programs for children at developmental risk that were identified by Craig Ramey and Sharon Ramey in their article, Early Intervention and Early Experience.2 The seven core features include: (1) longitudinal interventions starting in infancy and monitored through functional benchmarks; (2) intensive, comprehensive, and individualized programs and supports; (3) integral parent participation; (4) high program quality and frequent monitoring; (5) direct child interventions; (6) community-directed programs and integrated services; and (7) follow-through of child and family supports and program evaluation into the primary grades.

Several Pittsburgh urban neighborhoods have participated in this collaboratively designed and privately funded joint venture. Braddock’s 4 Kids Early Childhood Initiative and the Wilkinsburg ECI are two of the most distinctive of these community-driven ventures. A community leadership council established in Braddock forged a relationship between Woodland Hills School District, Head Start, and various formal and informal resources in the community (e.g., churches, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development community councils, and local hospital networks) to link services for children and families. In Wilkinsburg, Hosanna House, a broad community service center, incorporated family support programs as central features of their early care and education programs. In fact, these communities have lead efforts to incorporate the School Readiness Group, a nonprofit early childhood consortium, in order to harness the influence of cross-community partners to advocate for government, foundation, and agency funding.

SPECS Authentic Program Evaluation Research Model
In 1996 the Heinz Endowments and the ECI Management Council, composed of business, corporate, foundation, and community members, selected an interdisciplinary research team from Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and the UCLID Center at the University of Pittsburgh known as SPECS (Scaling Progress in Early Childhood Settings), as the winners of a national competition to conduct ECI’s longitudinal evaluation.

SPECS’ evaluation approach—authentic assessment and program evaluation research—helps community-based programs demonstrate “how good they are at what they do.” It has been validated in the field through evidence-based research conducted through “natural experiments” in real-life community settings rather than laboratory settings.3 SPECS’ strategies are unique and effective because they:

Use a collaborative research model with community partners for the formative and summative research phases.
Ask whether the program works in a natural setting rather than a laboratory setting.
Assess all children, families, and programs in the study without exclusions.
Apply the developmentally appropriate quality guidelines of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the Division for Early Childhood, Council for Exceptional Children, and the Head Start Performance Standards.
Do not use traditional “tabletop testing” and remove the child, teachers, or parents from their natural situation or “developmental ecology.”
Rely on ongoing observations from consistent caregivers in the child’s life.
Sample skills within the preschool’s developmental curriculum that are teachable and predictive of future kindergarten success.
Offer ongoing feedback to teachers, parents, and the community about children’s learning and needed program refinements.
Operationalize a longitudinal repeated-measures design using HLM and path analysis strategies.4
SPECS’ research methods track progress and interrelationships among multiple factors like children’s development (e.g., basic concepts, literacy, social skills, and self-control behaviors), parenting and family strengths, the standards and “best practices” of early childhood programs, and neighborhood resources and interagency partnerships in systems reform efforts.

The Results of the Early Childhood Initiative
The SPECS evaluation team carefully tracked the progress of 1,350 enrolled children between 1997 and 2003. The team observed and profiled progress three times each year, focusing on thinking, language, early literacy, social, behavioral, and play skills. They regularly provided feedback to teachers and parents to guide their teaching and care. They also conducted program quality evaluations in 25 programs in nine Pittsburgh neighborhoods (Braddock, Wilkinsburg, Sto-Rox, East Liberty, South Side, Highlands, Hill District, Homewood, and Steel Valley).

SPECS’ research on ECI’s impact showed major outcomes in four areas (for details see the box):

Children beat the odds and learned early skills for school success.
Mentored programs achieved stringent quality standards.
With teachers’ help, parents learned new ways to nurture their children’s development.
Communities proved their leadership and made their programs successful.
To download the full SPECS report or executive summary go to www.uclid.org:8080/uclid/ech_specs.html.

How Children Benefited From the Early Childhood Initiative (ECI)
Developmental Progress
• On entering the program, 86% of the children were classified as “high risk” for shortcomings in overall thinking, language, and social and school-readiness skills. Fourteen percent of the students were deemed to be both high-risk and developmentally delayed, which would qualify them for early intervention or special education services in Pennsylvania. The documented national rate for developmental delays is 3% to 8%.
• The longer that children participated in high quality ECI programs, the greater the developmental progress and achievement of early school success skills.
• After nearly three years in the program, the high-risk group showed at least average developmental progress without the typical setbacks for children of poverty documented in national research.
• The delayed group showed an accelerated rate of developmental progress into the average range that was 160% of the typical or expected rate in normal child development.

Social and Behavioral Progress
• ECI children in the full high-risk group achieved normal social skills and self-control behaviors compared to national peers.
• 18% of the children at entry into ECI showed significant problems with social skills and self-control behaviors that would qualify them for mental health diagnosis and support; this challenging behavior problem-group achieved normal social and behavioral skills after nearly three years of ECI participation.

Early School Success
• 125 of the children in the ECI program transitioned to kindergarten and first grade over this period.
• In the school districts from which students were recruited, an average of 23% of children are retained or “held back” in kindergarten and first grade, and 21% are referred to special education programs. After nearly three years of ECI participation, less than 2% were retained and less than 1% were referred for special education.
• End-of-year “blind” follow-up assessments by kindergarten and first grade teachers on the Basic School Skills Inventory-Revised, a nationally standardized achievement test of early learning skills, demonstrated that ECI children who transitioned to school performed at an average to above-average range compared to their national peers.

1 Yoshikawa, H., Rosman, E. A., & Hsueh, J. (2002). Resolving paradoxical criteria for the expansion and replication of early childhood care and education programs. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 17(3), 3–27.
2 Ramey, C. T., & Ramey, S. L. (1998). Early intervention and early experience. American Psychologist, 53(2), 109–120.
3 Bagnato, S. J., Suen, H. K., Brickley, D., Smith-Jones, J., & Dettore, E. (2002). Child developmental impact of Pittsburgh’s Early Childhood Initiative (ECI) in high-risk communities: First-phase authentic evaluation research. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 17(4), 559–580.
4 HLM (Hierarchical Linear Modeling) is an analysis that estimates the effects of social units—groups, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, organizations, communities, social networks, or whole social systems—on individuals. Path analysis refers to the method by which the path of the cause and effect relationship among variables is determined.

Stephen J. Bagnato, Ed.D.
Professor of Pediatrics & Psychology
Director, Early Childhood Partnerships
Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
The UCLID Center at the University of Pittsburgh
Tel: 412-692-6520
Email: steve.bagnato@chp.edu

Robert Grom
President and CEO
Heritage Health Foundation, Inc.
Greater Braddock Early Childhood Network

Leon Haynes
President and CEO
Hosanna House
Wilkinsburg Early Childhood Initiative