Dear Flight B Counties,
As you know, the Center for Family Research is currently engaged in the critical task of training all Flight A & B counties on the ESCORE Internet platform. 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!
What most of you do not yet know is that I have also been pretty busy on a different ESCORE task. Over the last several weeks, I have been speaking to Flight A counties regarding their data needs, and have used a tool that we have labeled the ESCORE Planning Report (available on the EScore website). This tool allows each county to communicate to me what their forecasts are about both a) what you want to know about your county’s overall service coordination efforts from the data; and b) how you would like to use this ESCORE data for local planning purposes. Why am I doing this, you might ask? In essence, as the person who is going to be analyzing and reporting data back to you, I need to make sure that I understand exactly what kind of information would be most useful to you and your county in the weeks and months ahead. Don’t worry about filling it out before I talk to you (but certainly feel free to jot down some ideas if they come to you!). My job is to help you complete the form as part of our ongoing dialogue about your county’s data needs.
Because I am fairly certain that your predictions about data needs will be influenced by exposure to the platform itself, I am planning on speaking to each of you after you have received training on the ESCORE platform. 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, FYI 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
