The Collaboration for Early Childhood — the organization funded by local taxing bodies to enhance the provision of early childhood resources in the village — has announced that it is parting ways with Oak Park-based Parenthesis Family Center, the vendor responsible for conducting home visits and facilitating various outreach efforts for the Collaboration.
In an Aug. 19 email statement, Ann C. Courter, the Collaboration’s board chair, said that the split was due to “some serious issues,” such as Parenthesis’s “financial stability,” “performance, leadership and operations, as well as accurate and complete reporting.”
“We fully understand and appreciate that Parenthesis has long been a respected and valued resource within our community,” Courter wrote, but noted that throughout the contract, the aforementioned issues “have caused the Collaboration to lose confidence in Parenthesis’s ability to reliably and sustainably deliver the family support services that they contracted with the Collaboration to provide.”
In a phone interview Thursday, Courter said the Collaboration’s contract with Parenthesis, which began in October 2013, has not yet officially been terminated.
“We have simply let them know, as a courtesy, that we were exploring options for another contractor,” she said, adding that the current contract with the firm has a “no fault termination with 45 days’ notice provision.” Courter said a formal termination date will depend on when a new contractor is able to begin work.
According to an April 2015 budget report, the Collaboration spent about $270,000 for home visiting services between July 2014 and March 2015, roughly 60 percent of the $447,000 it budgeted on the services for that year.
In a 2014 interview with Wednesday Journal, Carolyn Newberry-Schwartz, the Collaboration’s executive director, said her organization worked with Parenthesis to service more than 500 families, “providing them with parenting workshops and coaching sessions, in addition to information and referrals for more extensive support services.”
She said that Parenthesis had 48 families, many of them low-income, who included children with “developmental delays, broken relationships, unstable living arrangements and histories of substance use and abuse.”
“The Parenthesis staff often conducts street-level outreach by going into nail salons, barbershops, laundromats and apartment complexes with their message about the importance of early childhood education and raising awareness of programs such as Parents as Teachers,” Schwartz said.
In her email statement, Courter noted that an “inordinate amount of time” was spent by Newberry-Schwartz, as well as by some board members, on supporting Parenthesis’s “fragmented efforts to reach benchmarks in a timely manner.”
“All this seriously interferes with the Collaboration’s broader early childhood development mission within the community—and is unsustainable,” Courter wrote.
Addressing directly some of the claims in her email statement, Courter said part of the Collaboration’s contract obligation involves the aggregation and maintenance of a large amount of data.
Parenthesis home visitors were responsible for inputting data regarding each visit and each family into a web-based family contact management system called Visit Tracker.
“We had just a lot of time and energy invested in trying to make sure that all of [Parenthesis’s] staff and administrators understood how that should work,” Courter said. “Eventually, we got there, but it was quite a struggle.”
Bruce McNulty, Parenthesis’s board president, said in an interview on Thursday that he thinks what the Collaboration is doing is “really groundbreaking” and is “extremely disappointed not to be part of it.”
“We still believe that we’re the ideal partner, being the only Oak Park-based agency that does this kind of work. [Letting us go] would entail getting [an agency] outside of the community to do this work,” he said.
In a formal statement released the same day, Parenthesis countered some of the claims made by the Collaboration.
“Taxpayer dollars have been used prudently. We have served young families of Oak Park and River Forest with the highest level of expertise,” the statement read.
The Parenthesis statement also referenced feedback from participant surveys that were “well received and of high quality” and feedback, both written and verbal, “from outside agencies including the Ounce of Prevention” that have “validated” the organization’s success.
Courter said the positive feedback of Parenthesis from Ounce of Prevention doesn’t reflect that “it was primarily that it took a lot of our help to get there [and] to get to the point where they were preforming up to our standards.”
Neither Parenthesis nor Collaboration officials went into detail about the former’s financial stability, but in its statement, Parenthesis notes that “agency finances have critically changed through strategic and planful [sic] budgeting and increased fundraising to ensure not only the agency’s fiscal stability but its ability to administer this program to the highest levels of success.”
The Parenthesis statement also noted a change in leadership. This month, the agency announced Amy Starin as its new executive director. Starin, who will start her new position on August 31, replaces longtime executive director Kathy Kern, who is retiring after 13 years with the agency.
The statement notes that Starin was chosen “for her vast experience in children’s mental health, creating systems to support parents, data and financial management.”
Courter said that the Collaboration has identified, and are in discussions with, several potential vendors. She said she isn’t at liberty to reveal where these prospective vendors are based, but said they’re “in the area.”
Courter also noted that, unlike when they contracted with Parenthesis in 2013, there won’t likely be an open bidding process when searching for Parenthesis’s replacement. She said the bidding process two years ago was “very complicated.”
“The continuity of care for our families is our primary concern. We’re working hard to ensure there are no disruption of services for them,” said Courter, before adding that she hopes Parenthesis continues to serve clients in Oak Park and River Forest even after their contract is terminated.
“We are hoping that Parenthesis can keep serving clients and that they can remain good partners in the collaboration work that’s so important in our community,” she said.
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com
