Gainesville and Hall County employees are starting a program that will help babies as soon as they enter the world.
The Gainesville-Hall County Community Service Center will work with Northeast Georgia Medical Center and Hall County Family Connection Network to reduce child abuse and neglect by approaching all first-time parents who give birth at the medical center. The groups are joining forces thanks to a $274,000 grant awarded in August from the Governor’s Office for Children and Families.
Phillippa Lewis Moss, director of the service center, gave a presentation to City Council members Thursday morning to discuss how the program will work starting Jan. 1.
“I want to show the crux of why we want to do what we do,” she said while pointing to a brain scan of two infants. “The one on the left with a highlighted area at the temporal lobe has good parenting with a well-developed and stimulated brain. This person will be a productive citizen who contributes to our community.”
The brain on the left, which had dark spots on the temporal lobes, showed poor stimulation and possible exposure to violence, neglect and improper nourishment as a child, she said.
“This infant is one who costs the nation up to $33 billion per year in special education, juvenile court programs and social services,” Moss said. “It’s not impossible but more challenging and expensive to serve these children later.”
Under the new program called “Building Better Babies,” the current four programs First Steps, Healthy Families, Promoting Safe and Stable Families and Home Based Family Support will merge into one program to help all new parents with assessment, early, intermediate and intensive intervention services.
“The negative effects are not always an act of malice. Often we have parents who are unfamiliar with the territory of parenting,” she said. “Home visitation is the most powerful form of intervention in the entire country, and we’ll help teach parents the development milestones so they know when their child should be crawling, walking and speaking. When the child is not developing at that level, they know where to go to get assistance.”
City Council members were excited to hear about the collaboration efforts and the possibility of more federal funding in the future.
“These programs reemphasize the thought that you either spend money on the beginning of life or later,” council member Myrtle Figueras said. “Society has emphasized jails and drugs so much that if we were to start here and emphasize this piece of life, we wouldn’t have to build so much later. I see nothing but good with this program.”
The grant will help the program get started for the next three years, and Moss plans to pursue additional funding to keep it going in fiscal year 2014.
“The coordination puts us in a strategic position to better compete for funds. There are a lot of federal dollars for home visitation programs, and by merging our services we’re in a much better position,” Moss said. “The onus is on us over the next 36 months to secure those funds. We need your blessing to continue the program and leave us to put the pieces of the financial puzzle together.”
The council members agreed that Moss and hospital coordinators should move full speed ahead.
“I’ve always been a strong believer that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” council member George Wangemann said. “If we train our families, that will spread throughout the community and become a common part of Gainesville in the way we take care of babies.”