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TextI Can Help My Child Stay Healthy
Grant Kicks Off February 27
The Fairfax County Office for Children’s Greater Mount Vernon Community Head Start program has received an $8,000 grant funded by the national Head Start office, Johnson & Johnson, the UCLA Anderson School of Management and Kaiser Permanente. The grant, titled “I Can Help My Child Stay Healthy: Innovations in Head Start Literacy Training,” is funding a health education program for parents of children enrolled in the Greater Mount Vernon Community Head Start program.
The project kicked off with a workshop on Saturday, February 27 at the Gum Springs Children’s Center in Alexandria. Doctors, nurses, dentists, firefighters and EMS personnel assisted with the training.
“This project will help educate parents on how to properly manage the health care needs of their children,” explained Anne Taggart, coordinator of the Greater Mount Vernon Community Head Start program.
Nationally, the grant has provided training programs for more than 10,000 parents of children enrolled in Head Start. As a result, there has been a significant decrease among program participants of visiting clinics and emergency rooms for common conditions such as fever, earache, and runny nose. In addition, parents who received the training missed 42 percent fewer days of work, and their children missed 29 percent fewer days from school.
Lakeshore and Pal-Tech also provided resources to the February 27 training event.
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