Partnerships With State Agencies

OU Researchers Partner With State Agencies To Benefit Oklahoma

Erin Maher, OU Associate Professor

This summer, the University of Oklahoma unveiled its first strategic plan in a generation. “Lead On, University” – OU’s strategic plan for the Norman campus – provides a roadmap to unlocking OU’s greatest potential as one of the nation’s top public research universities. The plan is guided by five overarching pillars that stem from OU’s core traditions, which include enriching and positively impacting Oklahoma, the nation and the world through research and creative activity.

In the OU College of Arts and Sciences, Erin Maher, associate professor of sociology, is well underway in her efforts to cultivate cross-campus collaborations and state agency partnerships to help fulfill the strategic plan since arriving at OU just over two years ago.

Her work also aligns with the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, which was established by the bipartisan Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission Act of 2016 and signed by President Barack Obama in March 2016. The Act emphasizes that better use of existing data may improve how government programs operate.

“This [commission] really sets the stage for why these university and state agency relationships are so important,” said Maher. “We are in a time of government accountability where there is more and more demand for and requirement for evidence to accompany policy, interventions and resource spending. The need for state human service agencies to have evaluation capacity is very high. They are hiring internally, such as data managers, but still are often overwhelmed by day-to-day operations. They welcome more expertise and help.”

To meet the standard of evidence that is often required to accompany the spending of public dollars, state agencies have looked externally to third parties to provide objective evaluations, and universities offer a cost-effective way to do so. In that spirit, Maher is working on two projects that could bring significant additional federal grant dollars and federal reimbursement for social services that have been deemed effective through rigorous evaluations.

Several other academic units at OU also have relationships with state agencies. To provide an example, however, Maher, along with her OU colleagues, have worked closely with state agencies on the following projects.

“We have a major university here with expertise, and our overhead is usually lower than a for-profit firm. We have long-standing relationships with state agencies. All of this contributes to a mutually beneficial relationship that extends beyond a single project. We have established that we know their data systems, and combined with our relationships with leadership, we can quickly and effectively implement an evaluation to coincide directly with a new program in the field. This partnership has those essential benefits built into it. The collaboration between the program agency staff and leadership and OU researchers is intricate and built on a long-term relationship of trust and the ability to move quickly together on the ground and problem solve as the field trial goes on. You are constantly making adjustments to the evaluation. It is not like doing research in a lab where you can control all the conditions. That relationship aspect becomes super important so you can work together in the field to deliver services and evaluate them, and often, secure external funding to support both.” – Erin Maher

THE PROJECTS

Title IV-E Waiver Demonstration Project

This project was lead by the Center on Child Abuse and Neglect at the OU Health Sciences Center and the Oklahoma Department of Human Services. CCAN began in 1987 as the Section on Child Abuse and Neglect in the Department of Pediatrics with a grant from the Oklahoma Department of Human Services. Its objective was to organize the OU Health Sciences Center’s efforts in the treatment and prevention of child abuse and neglect.

Prior to the start of this Waiver Demonstration Project, the state of Oklahoma had been experiencing an increase in the number of children entering foster care that far surpassed the number of children exiting care, increasing the overall number of children in care annually.

In 2014, the Oklahoma Department of Human Services applied for a Title IV-E Waiver Demonstration project to address the large increase in the number of children in care. This demonstration project was designed to focus on increasing the safety and well-being of infants, children, teens and families in their homes and communities, including tribal communities, by supporting families to prevent entry into foster care and future child abuse and neglect referrals.

The waiver demonstration project allowed the Oklahoma Department of Human Services to develop and implement the Intensive Safety Services intervention. ISS is delivered in the home to families who, traditionally, would have experienced a child removal. The intent was that this immediate, focused service would allow identified families to safely remain together, and thereby, address the drastic increase in the number of children in care.

Led by OU’s Dr. Debra Hecht, OU faculty helped design a new service system to address common needs of families who experience child removal. They opted to construct a wrap-around service model that could address three main targets of need: interpersonal conflict, adult mental illness and substance use problems.

David Bard, OUHSC

Dr. David Bard, professor, OUHSC chief research information officer, director of the Biomedical and Behavioral Methodology Core, OUHSC Department of Pediatrics, led the team of researchers and evaluators who designed the study to test the effectiveness of the ISS system in Oklahoma.

These projects usually involve mixed methods study of administrative (e.g., Child Protective Services outcomes), survey and qualitative (e.g., semi-structured focus groups) data. Bard and Hecht brought on Maher when she arrived at OU as a co-investigator because of her field evaluation experience and to increase capacity at CCAN to take on additional projects.

Maher had first learned about the impressive evaluation work and state/university partnerships in place here from her previous job at a large national foundation in Seattle that had funded similar evaluations in the state. As Bard noted, “the Waiver project is a shining example of our state’s agility and ingenuity to simultaneously implement and study innovative services that address real-world issues. The success of this project is a testament to the wonderful historic partnerships established between the university and our state agencies as well as the interconnection of abundant and diverse scientific talent across our OU campuses.”

Keitha Wilson, DHS

Charlotte Kendrick, M.S.W., LCSW, former program administrator at the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, helped prepare the state agency for this historic endeavor and guided the project operations through its first four years. Before retiring from DHS two years ago and joining the faculty in the OU Department of Social Work, Kendrick transitioned the project to her colleague, Keitha Wilson, the DHS Family First Prevention Services administrator, who has been overseeing the ongoing implementation of ISS ever since.

“The intent was that this immediate, focused service would allow identified families to safely remain together, and thereby, address the drastic increase in the number of children in care,” said Wilson. “The rigorous evaluation completed by OUHSC and OU Norman showed ISS resulted in fewer children entering out-of-home care compared to service as usual. However, the sustainability of ISS depended on the fiscal feasibility, and measuring this was a requirement of the demonstration project. The cost analysis of ISS showed that in a short amount of time—three years, the more expensive and intensive intervention model gets closer to being no more expensive than not using it, which reflects the better outcomes that it achieves, offsetting the additional service delivery costs. This allowed child welfare leaders to make a sound fiscal decision to continue funding this preventive service. This would not have been made possible without the partnership between OUHSC and OU."

OUTCOME AND THE FUTURE

Oklahoma was one of the few waiver demonstration sites/states that conducted a randomized controlled trial. The demonstration projects have ended and landmark new legislation passed: The Family First Prevention Services Act. This new federal legislation allows states to submit evidence of preventing children from going into foster care to a federal clearinghouse on interventions. If the evidence is deemed strong, states can seek federal reimbursement for providing these programs.

After having wrapped up the five-year Waiver Demonstration project’s evaluation, the evaluation team at OUHSC and OU Norman is continuing to evaluate the intervention the state developed to ready it for review by the clearinghouse. Peer-reviewed manuscripts are in process. Additionally, Oklahoma made the decision to continue the intervention beyond the Waiver Demonstration period and also to continue the evaluation partnership, which is critical to forthcoming federal reimbursement for services.

“The Child Welfare field continues to make important strides in using data, research and evaluation to inform practice and make sound decisions on what services to purchase that will result in the best possible outcomes for children, youth and families,” said Wilson. “DHS, OUHSC and OU have had long-standing professional partnerships, and DHS capitalized on these very solid, already existing partnerships to assure the success of this project and ultimately to the benefit of the children and families we serve.”

In 2019, Maher received an evaluation contract from the Oklahoma Partnership for School Readiness to support the goals of a Preschool Development Grant awarded to them by the departments of U.S. Health and Human Services and Education. The $3 million federal grant, Oklahoma’s Future Begins with Children (OKFutures), was a one-year grant to conduct a needs assessment and strategic plan through a collaborative and community engagement process for improving the quality, availability and parental choice for early care and education for the birth to age 5 population throughout the state of Oklahoma. Maher partnered with Diane Horm, director of the Early Childhood Education Institute on the OU-Tulsa campus, to conduct the evaluation. OPSR leaders wanted to keep the evaluation local and build evaluation capacity jointly with OU.

Diane Horm, OU-Tulsa

Maher and Horm were brought in shortly after the grant was awarded as evaluation contractors and co-chairs of the grant’s evaluation team. There were two purposes for evaluation. One was to evaluate of the success of the first-year planning grant activities, including some pilot evaluations. The second was to develop a Program Performance Evaluation plan for a cross-sector early childhood systems evaluation focused on improving child outcomes. For the latter purpose, Maher and Horm subcontracted with Mathematica Policy Research to bring in a national perspective and help them meet the tight deliverable timeline of less than one year. Responsiveness is key to the success of these partnerships and timelines are often tight.

Debra Andersen, OSPR

“The intent of the grant was to build partnerships for strategic planning and implementation, and the evaluation of collaboration efforts led by OPSR was conducted by Dr. Maher and Dr. Horm,” said Debra Andersen, executive director with the Oklahoma Partnership for School Readiness. “Overall, results of this evaluation were positive; however, the evaluation highlighted some areas for improvement that has been useful insights for my organization.

“We’re fortunate to have nationally recognized early childhood researchers from multiple disciplines in our state. Recent funding opportunities have provided us the opportunity to leverage this knowledge to inform how we measure the benefits of early childhood programs in Oklahoma. We look forward to continuing to strengthen these partnerships in the future.”

OUTCOME AND THE FUTURE

Unfortunately, Oklahoma did not receive the federal PDG B-5 implementation grant after the one-year planning grant. So, for now, the components of the strategic plan and its associated evaluation plan that require funding are on hold. However, OPSR and its partners in Oklahoma continue to meet and pursue funding and other opportunities to implement components of the plan.

“State early childhood systems with strong university partnerships are those that are building quality programs and improving child outcomes,” said Andersen. “Over the past few years, Oklahoma has seen progress in building connections between OU and HSC and all early childhood programs under the coordination of OPSR. This partnership brings credibility for our work with our partners and assists OPSR in using evidence to inform policy decisions.

“Through our annual early childhood research symposium, we have partnered with OU and OUHSC to plan the symposium. The symposium provides a platform to present research to practitioners to improve their practices and to have knowledge of research being conducted in our state. We have seen an increase in programs making decisions based on increased exposure to research and our evaluation experts in the state.”

Horm added that along with Bard, she has served on the Planning Committee for OPSR’s Research Symposium since its inception. She echoed Andersen’s observation that “the OK Research Symposium has served as a mechanism to both highlight existing research and spotlight areas in need of additional research to inform practice and policy across our state.”

She added, “This type of forum also builds trust between agency administrators, policy makers and practitioners and reiterates that researchers share their same goals—excellent services and outcomes for Oklahoma’s children and families. This trust is the first step in designing and conducting meaningful applied research that positions OU to contribute to the wellbeing of our state’s citizens.”