From Their Lives: A Manual on How to Conduct Focus Groups of Low-Income Parents

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/facbooks/1100/thumbnail.jp

Child Care and Children with Special Needs - Challenges for Low Income Families: Parents\u27 Voices

While the primary focus of this research is access to child care by low income families of children with special needs, we are also looking at the related issues of welfare reform, the impact on work force participation of having a child with special needs, and the issue of coordination of early intervention services with the child care system. This is a three-year study which began on October 1, 2001. (From the Introduction.)https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/facbooks/1115/thumbnail.jp

Child Care and Work Challenges for Maine’s Parents of Children with Special Needs

Research by the authors with parents, child care providers, and other service providers found that parents of children with special needs face particular challenges trying to maintain stable employment while balancing work and family. These parents have more difficulty finding and keeping child care for children with special needs, and there is a lack of coordination of therapy with child care programs. Since the study was completed, Maine has taken several steps to begin to address these issue

English Language Learners in the State of Maine: Early Education Policy That Can Make a Difference

The authors discuss the increasing number of Maine children who are English language learners (ELL) or who are limited-English proficient (LEP), noting that insufficient attention has been paid to the preschool education of this group. The authors describe lessons learned from an Early Reading First Program in Portland, which enhanced the school-readiness of preschool ELL children

Building a Model and Framework for Child Welfare Supervision

This report, Building a Model and Framework for Child Welfare Supervision, presents the findings from an extensive review of the most recent literature combined with interviews of experts in the field of child welfare, currently practicing child welfare administrators, supervisors, frontline practitioners, and trainers. The report is organized into three sections: • Section I introduces seven elements of an emerging model of supervision in child welfare. • Section II presents an integrated organizational framework consisting of four components required to empower child welfare supervisors to effectively carry out their administrative, educational, and supportive functions. • Section III incorporates supports useful to agencies in implementing the recommendations contained in this report. These include our interview protocols, the annotated results of our extensive literature review, a sample job description, and our methodology

New Americans: Child Care Decision-Making of Refugee and Immigrant Parents of English Language Learners

The immigrant and refugee communities in the United States continue to increase. Denver, Colorado and Portland, Maine are two U.S. cities that reflect the changing demographics across the country. As these cities evolve and adjust to serve new populations, it becomes necessary to rethink deep-rooted culturally constructed patterns and traditions that do not take into account the beliefs and practices of these new cultures. One such tradition is child care. Because of the important link between preschool experiences and later school success, understanding refugee and immigrant families’ beliefs and decisions about child care is extremely important. From a policy perspective, understanding these beliefs can guide professional development training for child care providers serving these linguistically and culturally diverse families

Children at Risk in the Child Welfare System: Collaborations to Promote School Readiness - Final Report

This study examines the degree to which key players in the child welfare, early intervention/preschool special education (EI/Preschool SPED) and early care and education (ECE) systems (e.g. Head Start, preschool, child care centers, family child care homes) collaborate to meet the developmental needs of children ages 0 to 5 who are involved in the child welfare system. This research includes an analysis of data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Wellbeing (NSCAW) as well as a case study in Colorado involving interviews with key stakeholders and statewide surveys of caseworkers and foster parents

Which imaging modality is superior for prediction of response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with triple negative breast cancer?

Background and Objectives. Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) has been shown to be generally chemosensitive. We sought to investigate the utility of mammography (MMG), ultrasonography (US), and breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in predicting residual disease following neoadjuvant chemotherapy for TNBC. Methods. We identified 148 patients with 151 Stage I–III TNBC treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Residual tumor size was estimated by MMG, US, and/or MRI prior to surgical intervention and compared to the subsequent pathologic residual tumor size. Data were compared using chi-squared test. Results. Of 151 tumors, 44 (29%) did not have imaging performed prior to surgical treatment. Thirty-eight (25%) tumors underwent a pathologic complete response (pCR), while 113 (75%) had residual invasive disease. The imaging modality was accurate to within 1 cm of the final pathologic residual disease in 74 (69%) cases and within 2 cm in 94 (88%) cases. Groups were similar with regards to patient age, race, tumor size and grade, and clinical stage (). Accuracy to within 1 cm was the highest for US (83%) and the lowest for MMG (56%) (). Conclusions. Breast US and MRI were more accurate than MMG in predicting residual tumor size following neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with TNBC. None of the imaging modalities were predictive of a pCR