U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Parent Support Outreach Program: Minnesota's Early Intervention Track

NCJ Number
224952
Journal
Protecting Children Volume: 23 Issue: 1 & 2 Dated: 2008 Pages: 23-29
Author(s)
David Thompson; Gary L. Siegel; L. Anthony Loman
Date Published
2008
Length
7 pages
Annotation
The paper describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of Minnesota’s Parent Support Outreach Program (PSOP), a prevention and early intervention program for families at risk of child maltreatment.
Abstract
The alternative response pilot project in Minnesota was a programmatic response and an attempt to attend to cases at the less critical end of the maltreatment spectrum in a noncoercive way, providing services when needed, where services have infrequently been provided before, in the hope the problems would not become more acute. The evaluation of the PSOP validated the expectation that greater investment in effort and service dollars up front would thin the stream of families reappearing in the child protection system. Classic assessments of child protection in the United States describe a system able to provide services only to the most severely abused and neglected children. With the support of a grant, the Minnesota Department of Human Services elected to begin addressing the underserved and at-risk population with the piloting of the PSOP. PSOP is a prevention and early intervention program focused on families who have children under the age of six and who have been reported for child maltreatment concerns but screened out from a formal child protection response. The PSOP began in April 2005 and continues through 2008. It tests the impact of early intervention on families at risk of child maltreatment. References

Publication Format
Article
Publication Type
Program/Project Evaluation
Language
English
Country
United States of America
Note
Special issue on Exploring Differential Response: One Pathway Toward Reforming Child Welfare, for related articles see NCJ-224951, and NCJ-224953-58.