Dear Flight A Counties,
As you know, the Center for Family Research staff members currently are engaged with 2 critical tasks:
* Training all Flight A & B counties on the ESCORE Internet platform * Creating and modifying the ESCORE Planning Reports Trainings already have occurred in the Northwest and Northeast regions. The Southwest and East regions will be receiving training in January (we also will be making up one NE training that was snowed out!), and we are working with your regional coordinator in order to schedule a time for the South region. In turn, these trainings are generating important feedback as we test all of the ESCORE platform features, and hence our web developers continue to adapt and adjust the site’s operations to better meet your needs. In short, however, the platform seems to have been a rather huge hit!
I have had the personal pleasure of speaking to many of you about your data needs, and the vast majority of Flight A counties already have a Planning Report in some state of readiness. I am pleased to report that the Planning Reports are shaping up as excellent forecasts of each of your needs for information about a) what your county’s service coordination efforts look like; and b) topics related to using the ESCORE data for local planning purposes. Bottom line: I understand a good deal about what you need me to do with your data!
Because I spoke to each of you prior to the implementation of the training, I had predicted that those Planning Reports were going to change as a result of your exposure to the platform and its many data capture features. Hence, I will be circling back around to talk with each of you early in 2008 to talk about further thoughts that you have about your data needs. Also, I hope to be having discussions in the very near future with the OFCF leadership team in terms of their own Planning Report. Here, I will be discussing how their access to the aggregated ESCORE database can begin to guide statewide planning and policy considerations around service coordination.
Last but not least, I wanted to wish all of you the happiest of holidays!
Steve Gavazzi on behalf of the OSU Center for Family Research Team
