Interagency coordination and ongoing communication between involved Commonwealth agencies is essential to identify challenges and meet children’s needs. The OCA has been working since 2017 to increase information sharing and collaboration by facilitating monthly interagency meetings designed to ensure adequate cross-agency communication, to discuss challenges to service provision, to identify trends that need to be addressed through collaborative efforts, and to serve as an early-warning system of potential crisis.
Oversight and regulation are especially important to ensure children served in residential schools are safe and their needs are adequately met. Currently, oversight and regulation of residential schools are distributed across multiple state agencies, including the Department of Early Education and Care, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Department of Children and Families, and the Department of Mental Health, each of which play a unique role in the system.
In addition to the interagency meetings, the OCA prioritizes and is working on progressing ideas related to systems-redesign, data coordination across providers and agencies, and streamlining and formalizing processes to ensure the Commonwealth has a well-coordinated approach to residential schools and other congregate care settings.
This group's work is born out of previous OCA work on the Interagency Working Group on Residential Schools.