Mountainstar Family Relief Nursery

Child abuse and neglect: we served 247 children and their families through our Relief Nursery in fye2023. 99.6% of all children enrolled in our Relief Nursery services remained safe from confirmed reports of abuse and neglect during the fiscal year. In addition, 95% of children in the therapeutic early childhood program met or exceeded widely-held expectations for social emotional development. 51% of families with children enrolled in the tecp reported improvements in Family functioning and resiliency. All children enrolled in our classrooms were offered health, vision, behavioral, and dental screenings on-site. We are partnering with local health systems to reduce redundance, achieve collective impact, and improve the health of children in our community. (continued on sch o) in fy2022-23, we continued to work on our program site expansion in la pine. Due to several construction and permitting delays, we anticipate the program opening fully in the following fiscal year. We were able to add 7 new positions to our program staff (now 26 staff members) to increase the internal efficiency of our programs and provide additional outreach and basic needs supports to the community. One of the new staff members is specifically serving families living in warm springs and those who are members of the confederated tribes of warm springs. This is our first outreach and connection into this community. We were also able to add a full-time volunteer coordinator to our staff. We continue to be very concerned for the vulnerable children and families we serve. The challenges faced by Mountainstar families - such as poverty, food and housing insecurity, domestic violence, and mental and physical illnesses - continue to be exacerbated by the consequences of the covid-19 pandemic, and now becoming even more difficult in the face of extreme inflation. The therapeutic services, support, and safety infrastructure that we provide continue to be critical to helping vulnerable children and families succeed.

We continued our three preschool promise classrooms from the previous year, and added a fourth classroom (in redmond) during fye2023. These classrooms served children who would have previously been sent to other preschools after "graduating" from Relief Nursery services. Since adding these classrooms, we have been able to maintain relationships with the families and continue to provide wrap-around services. We served 33 children through our preschool promise classrooms. Over the course of the school year, 100% of children enrolled in these classrooms met widely-held expectations for both social-emotional development, and 88% met the expectations for language development. These two areas that are critical for success in kindergarten, throughout school, and into adult life. (continued on sch o) we will continue to work with the Oregon department of early learning and care (delc) to make sure that the preschool promise program is implemented in a way that includes vulnerable children and families, and helps them achieve to their potential.