Sustainability of California's   
Healthy Start Initiative

Healthy Start, funded by the California Department of Education, is one manifestation of the Learning Support model that has been active in California since 1991. The Healthy Start program initiative has reached 1,244 schools, serving a total of 949,430 children across the state. Since the Healthy Start initiative proved to be both effective and sustainable in its efforts to improve outcomes for school-aged children, there is interest in expanding the initiative to provide targeted services to younger children. Increased understanding about the long-term payoffs of healthy development within the first few years of life coupled with the emergence of a new funding stream to support early chil0dhood development, and make the expansion a timely possibility. Funding for this expansion could be available through the state’s tobacco tax funds accrued through Proposition 10, the Children and Families First Act. This recently initiated funding source, which provides about $700 million annually for services targeting the 0-5 population, follows the same pattern of Healthy Start’s broad-based supports, but for a younger population. CHCFC assessed the potential of using the Healthy Start initiatives as a platform for providing school-based, integrated, early childhood services, and produced a report addressing three primary questions:

• Are Healthy Start sites currently focusing a major amount of their resources and attention on early childhood programs?
   
• Could Healthy Start sites be used as potential platforms for the development of early childhood learning supports? And
   
• How can Proposition 10 be utilized to build upon the Healthy Start Initiative?