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Click here to find the State of Maryland Directory of Local Access Mechanisms (LAMs).
Drug Free Queen Anne’s is a community coalition established under the Queen Anne's County Drug and Alcohol Council. They are leading the efforts to reduce teen substance abuse. The citizen-driven Coalition reports to the Council and the Council supports the Coalition and receives most of its funding from a Drug Free Communities Grant awarded from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. From the Coalition, six subgroups include the Assets Team, the Character Counts Advisory Council, Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol, DMR/ CommUNITY Planning Team, Teen Court, and the Youth Summit Team. A Prevention Coordinator supports the day-to-day operation of the Drug Free Communities Support Program coordination and to assists with Teen Court planning.
Drug Free Queen Anne’s Coalition uses the community mobilization framework of Youth Development Asset Building as the guiding philosophy. Within that framework they are able to place more emphasis on both the Strategic Prevention Framework and Results Accountability to provide the guiding principles for achieving efforts to outcomes. The subgroup strategies are a result of emphasizing multiple strategies in multiple settings. The approach has been systematically laid out from working through each of the five Strategic Prevention Framework steps. Within the coalition there are eight separate working groups:
The Assets Team
promoting the Youth Developmental Asset Building philosophy)
Character Counts Advisory Council
emphasizing 8 of the 40 assets related to character development
Communities Mobilizing for Change on Alcohol
strategies specific to teen alcohol use reduction
DMR/ CommUNITY Planning Team
implementing minority achievement strategies for youth
Youth Summit
providing a teen-driven and faith-based annual venue of issues and answers
The Teen Court Program is a diversionary program designed to provide young first-time offenders who commit minor offenses with a second chance and opportunity to learn from their mistakes without imposition of a juvenile record. Instead of appearing in Juvenile Court before a Master or Judge, juvenile offenders appear before a jury of their peers who determine the appropriate sanctions for the conduct committed. Sanctions may include jury services, community service hours, participation in extracurricular activities after school, apology letters, a Detention Center tour, a Smoking Cessation Program or a Queen Anne’s County Department of Health Referral, or a MADD Program. The program was started in Queen Anne's County by the States Attorney Frank Kratovil, Jr. Click her for more information.
An important part of achieving our goal to ensure that the families of Queen Anne's County have the services they need is by implementing, coordinating and overseeing programs and projects designed to the specific needs of Queen Anne's County. These programs are designed by the members of the Board based on their strategic plan. This part of the web site is dedicated to providing an overview of all the programs funded and supported by the Queen Anne's County Community Partnerships for Children and Families.
Please note that this page is still in development and does not yet have all of the programs listed that are supported by the Partnership. We are working diligently to get you a more thorough list. In the meat time you may contact us and we will be happy to either talk with you or send you the information that you requested. Click here to send an email or call the Queen Anne's County Community Partnerships for Children and Families at (410)758-6677.
The Community Partnerships for Children and Families selected three priority Result Areas or goals for the next five years. These desired results were chosen in November of 2006 based on a review of the trend data in Queen Anne’s County over the past five years. Result areas are goals for children, families and the communities in which they live. Maryland has identified eight result areas affecting a child’s health, well-being, and security. Each Local Management Board in Maryland generally strives to meet all result areas while emphasizing select result areas based on local statistics or soft data including those from focus groups, surveys, town meetings, or interviews. The Queen Anne’s County Community Partnerships for Children and Families priority result areas are:
Children Enter School Ready to Learn,
Children Successful in School, and
Communities that Support Family Life.
Queen Anne’s County Early Childhood System of Care
Early childhood service providers in Queen Anne’s County have joined together under the leadership of the Queen Anne’s County Community Partnerships for Children and Families (the Local Management Board) to develop an integrated “System of Care” from our already collaborative array of state, local, public and private services for families with children pre-natal to five years of age. Queen Anne’s County is one of only two jurisdictions in the state that continues to host a strong and vital Children’s Council, now meeting monthly for over 30 years. An active early childhood committee and annual breakfasts with legislators have helped set the stage for turning many indicator curves in a positive direction. A System of Care will create a network, unified by a common vision, to support shared training among programs, streamline eligibility and referral processes, track indicators which measure achievement of a result, and address gaps and duplications in service. Our vision is that “Every Child in Queen Anne’s County will begin life healthy and begin school ready to learn.”
With a Resource Development and Enhancement grant from the Governor’s Office for Children, the Local Management Board convened a planning team representing Early Childhood programs from the County’s Board of Education, Department of Health, Judy Center, Family Support Center, Character Counts, Even Start, MSDE Child Care Administration, Chesapeake Child Care Resource Center, and Parks and Recreation programs. Supported by Linda Walls of Just Cause, L.L.C., the team reviewed over 30 indicators of early childhood well-being in the county, and researched nine Early Childhood System of Care models being used in states from Arkansas to Iowa to Vermont.
In May, 2007, the team held a Symposium at Chesapeake College to involve stakeholders and community members in creating an initial Action Plan to advance key result areas in Health [Babies Born Healthy & Healthy Children] Education [Nurturing Early Care and Education Environments & Children Enter School Ready to Learn] and Community [Children Safe in Their Families and Communities & Communities That Support Family Life].
Using “Results Accountability” as the planning framework for the Symposium, the team provided trend lines and proposed results to lay the foundation for efficient and thoughtful response from the 40 plus participants. Participants signed an “Action Plan Endorsement” form, committing to promote and help implement the Action Plan.
During the fall of 2007 and winter of 2008 grant funds were and will be used to sponsor trainings open to system partners and other stakeholders. These trainings include Cultural Competence, Results Accountability, T. Berry Brazelton’ s “Touchpoints Early Care and Education,” Ruby Payne’s “A Framework for Understanding Poverty”, and Special Considerations in Serving Latino Families of Young Children. In addition Efforts to Outcomes (ETO) software was introduced to early childhood partners to assist in tracking data and measuring performance for individual programs as well as the whole system.
These trainings will furnish partners from various agencies and disciplines with common approaches and vocabularies, and help create a unified framework for assessing the effect of services on the result areas. In addition, staff members from different programs become better acquainted with one another and deepen their knowledge of all programs.
The planning team’s next steps will be to locate an administrative “home” for the Systems initiative, and to seek foundation funds for a coordinator charged with developing the system further. They also intend to pursue several low-cost action steps such as enlisting the faith community to publicize outreach messages on healthy pregnancy, and involving college media students in producing local cable-TV segments on pre-natal health, positive parenting, and the economic benefits of public investment in Early Childhood. This first phase of building a System of Care has brought partners together in the collaborative spirit that is already creating more coordinated and effective services to families.
Prepared 11/07 by
Patricia Deitz, L.C.S.W.-C. pdeitz@dhmh.state.md.us
Program Manager, Healthy Families Queen Anne’s/Talbot
Queen Anne’s County Department of Health
Centreville, MD 21617
For more information on the QA Early Childhood System of Care contact mgleason@qac.org
Mary Ann Gleason, Queen Anne’s Community Partnerships for Children and Families
P.O. Box 418, Centreville MD 21617
Healthy Families Queen Anne’s/Talbot provides intensive prevention and early intervention services to first-time parents, residing in Queen Anne’s or Talbot County, eligible for Maryland Children’s Health Program (M-CHP) and at risk for poor parenting outcomes because of their own history of abuse as a child, current or past mental illness, substance abuse, anger control problems, inadequate support, high stress, limited knowledge about child development and other risk factors. Click here for more information. Click here for the Healthy Families Annual Report to the Community.
CASASTART case managers work closely with teachers and other school personnel, police officers, social service agencies and neighborhood residents to coordinate, arrange for and provide needed services and support to prevent or counteract the familial, social, educational and psychological factors that make children vulnerable to substance abuse and juvenile crime.
It focuses on a targeted population
It reaches children early—before they get hooked on alcohol or drugs
It focuses on families and creates a support network outside of the program
CASASTARTsm is a model created at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (For more information on the national model go to their site: www.casastart.org) and helps families dig out of crises that may be contributing to a child’s substance abuse or delinquency, but, more importantly, it places heavy emphasis on building strengths that will help the family – and the child – confront new crises in the future, after their participation in CASASTART has ended. A focus on building assets and resources that endure beyond involvement with CASASTART, even while addressing immediate crises, is central to the program’s mission. Click here for more information about the program in Queen Anne's County.