NEW OUTLOOK FOR CDS

By agreeing to remove a sunset provision in its bill on Child Development Services, the Department of Education properly lifted the possibility that regional CDS sites and their governing boards would have been eliminated. Now it can go even further by supporting a bill that renews Maine’s commitment to these services in a cost-effective way.

The push to cut CDS has been going on since at least 1991, when then-Education Commissioner Eve Bither proposed to eliminate the regional offices but leave the state bureaucracy intact. The plan didn’t make sense then, and while the current department seems to have put more thought into this latest version, legislators shouldn’t assume it makes sense now.

CDS provides services in such areas as speech and physical therapy and social and cognitive development at 16 sites statewide to Maine children from birth to age 5. The department has been working toward greater centralization of some components of CDS, which may be desirable, as long as the reform is done with plenty of input from the sites.

More input is badly needed, says Susan Mackey Andrews of Dover-Foxcroft, who is a national expert on these systems. She recently testified that Maine’s out-of-state payroll contractor has been performing poorly, CDS employees are quitting their jobs and finding new employees has been difficult, CDS directors and boards aren’t receiving necessary financial reports, there’s an absence of training and technical assistance, and most important, children aren’t receiving the services they were identified as needing.

In brief, she says, “CDS is losing its infrastructure, its integrity and its ability to do what needs to be done for Maine’s children 0-5 and their families.”

This should alarm the Education Committee, which already has been urged by parents to go slowly on further centralization and to heed the recent report by the Subcommittee to Study Early Childhood Education, which lawmakers created last year. That group’s findings can now be found in LD 1850, a major bill that keeps CDS intact, requires it to report annually on its performance and requires the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services to adopt common dual-department standards for children from birth to 8 years of age based on the work of nationally recognized associations.

The legislation also demands increased collaboration and oversight and to establish a funding formula for CDS sites. There are nearly two dozen separate directives in the bill and lawmakers may find that not all are as they would write them, but the subcommittee’s work supplies the foundation for any reform.

After so many years of trying to chip away at the CDS system, Augusta now has before it a thoughtful and extensive means to revitalize it. Lawmakers should be eager to use LD 1850 as the basis for any future work on this valuable service.