Julie Spielberger, Principal Investigator
2009

For more than a decade, Florida’s Palm Beach County has been building a system of prevention and early intervention services to promote and support the healthy development and school readiness of children from birth to age 8. The county began this effort with a set of programs focused on serving families in four targeted geographic areas that have high levels of risk for poverty, teen pregnancy, crime, and child maltreatment. Although separate evaluations have been conducted on several individual programs and networks that are part of the Palm Beach County service system, these evaluations alone cannot provide information on how families use multiple services over time or how a system of services might affect children’s well-being and development. The goal of this multi-year study is to describe the characteristics and needs of families the service system is intended to serve, how they use the programs that make up the service system in Palm Beach County and other services; how service use is related to indicators of child well-being, family functioning, and child outcomes; and opportunities and challenges for improving the Palm Beach County service system.