Imagine a place – a community, a county, a state – where every child walks into the classroom on the first day of kindergarten ready to learn. It doesn’t matter if the child comes from a low-income family, a family led by a single parent, or it’s a child with developmental or other needs that could hinder learning.

That’s what the people involved with the Early Childhood Colorado Framework to see in the not-too-distant future.

Last week the program expanded its mission to cover all Colorado children from pre-natal to age 8. Thirty-one councils on early childhood operate within the program, in 58 of Colorado’s 64 counties. It’s based on three principles, organizers say: access, quality and equity.

According to Reggie Bicha, executive director of the Colorado Department of Human Services, that means access to programs and services that support all kids and their families; expecting more from the professionals who provide those services; and a program that serves all Colorado residents, no matter where they live or the family’s income level.

In Grand County, the program has resulted in annual developmental screenings for every child ages 3 to 5. Those screenings are conducted by all kinds of professionals involved with the child, including primary care physicians, licensed child-care providers, public health and social services staff and teachers in the local school districts.

It’s a level of coordination among all of the professionals in a child’s life that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the country, according to Barbara Brogan, co-chair of the Early Childhood Colorado Commission. The framework has put Colorado into the forefront nationally for early childhood, she said last week.

Former Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien was involved with the program from its inception in 2008. It took more than two years just to get everyone to the table, she said, since people in the different disciplines were reluctant to work together.

Children aren’t divided up the way society divides itself, with healthcare in one place and education or mental health in another, O’Brien told The Colorado Statesman. “We tried to show professionals that, if your area is health, what you do affects how that child will perform in school.” It helped the professionals change how they viewed children, whether involving planning or funding that would follow the child from one service to another, she added.

Relatively small among counties, Grand County has just 13 licensed child care providers and a handful of primary care physicians, according to Maegan Lokteff, director of Grand Beginnings But in her 20 years in child services, she said she’s never seen the kind of collaboration that the program promotes. All the child-care providers, physicians, social services, public health, and school districts use the same screening tool for developmental issues, and they all follow the same process to make sure every child gets screened and then gets referrals and follow-ups, if needed.

When a child is flagged as needing assistance under the program, every adult who interacts with that child receives the same information on his or her goals. It doesn’t matter if the child spends two days a week with grandma, or two days a week with a child-care provider or preschool teacher. Everyone is working toward the same goal, according to an official with DHS.

The county has set as a goal that every child is screened three times by age 3 and five times by age 5. So far, Lokteff said they’ve screened nearly 80 percent of the children in Grand County, which this year counts 650 children under age 5. Early screening makes it easier to provide intervention for a child in need instead of waiting for those things to happen in kindergarten, she said.

The Framework program, housed in the three-year-old Office of Early Childhood at the Department of Human Services, depends on grassroots work by the councils. That means each of the 31 councils work with local communities to set priorities, so what happens in one county isn’t necessarily duplicated somewhere else. The councils existed long before the framework, but council directors and staff laud the program for helping them to rethink policies and strategies, leading to integration of services in a way that hadn’t happened before.

In southwestern Colorado’s Montezuma and Dolores counties, the Montelores Early Childhood Council developed a local early-childhood system that integrates health, mental health, family support and education. That includes family nights, professional development for early childhood-service providers and a training institute for families who want to become leaders and active participants in the community.

The program amounts to a collaborative effort among state agencies, officials said. The Office of Early Childhood includes staff from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, and Health Care Policy and Financing. But the Framework also relies on partnerships with business and non-profits. The Colorado Trust was an early funder of the Framework in its first six years, providing millions of dollars in grants to the councils to help establish health services as part of local early-childhood development efforts.

Grand County’s Lokteff said her county now hits national standards for referrals for early intervention. For a child with developmental needs, such as autism, an intervention at age 2 or 3, instead of age 5, means that child can often be in a regular classroom when he or she starts school, rather than winding up in a special-education setting.

Anna Jo Haynes, known as the “godmother of early childhood” in Colorado, said the Framework creates “a feeling of belonging and being on the same sheet of music” with everyone working on the same goal for a child.

– marianne@coloradostatesman.com