Why Colorado?

There are a number of reasons why we have chosen Colorado as our case for this study. First, there are policy and program-based reasons for why Colorado will make a particularly useful case study. Colorado is among the majority of states which did not pick up the option to cover at risk children under Part C of IDEA; thus, the implications of the new requirement under CAPTA to refer children in substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect to Part C of IDEA may have a bigger impact. Therefore, Colorado’s experience implementing that requirement is likely to offer useful lessons to the majority of states which fall into that category. Further, Colorado’s administrative structure for its IDEA early intervention system is similar to most other states in that the Part C Early Intervention program is administered through the State agency and regional offices for children 0 to 3 and, for 3-5 year olds, the Part B Preschool Special Education Program is supported by the state Department of Education but is administered by the local school districts.

Colorado also has ethnic and racial diversity, as well as socioeconomic variability and geographic diversity which ranges from frontier/rural to urban. Based on our earlier work in Colorado we suspect that these three factors – socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity and its geographic variability –will be relevant to whether IDEA and ECE services are received by children within the child welfare system and the degree to which partnerships are formed between the child welfare system, the early intervention systems and the early care and education system.

Lastly, the comprehensive nature of this study makes multi-state analysis infeasible. This type of in-depth, multi-level analysis across service systems and agencies will be labor intensive and will require that we secure cooperation from state, county and local officials and all key players within the three systems. Staff at Muskie’s Institute for Child and Family Policy have already established working relationships with the relevant state and county level agencies in Colorado . The Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) currently contracts with the Cutler Institute to conduct a project entitled Improving Coordination between Child Welfare and the Education System on Behalf of Children in Out of Home Care to research and make policy recommendations to improve their coordination with the public school system. Officials at CDHS and at the Colorado Department of Education who represent the three systems involved in this study have expressed their interest and offered their cooperation in this project. The strong interest in better coordination between their early care and education and early intervention/preschool special education systems expressed to us by Colorado officials will be critical in gaining access to the interviewees we need to conduct this study, and for the likelihood of implementation of the policy recommendations we will make based on our findings.