Increasing Opportunity and Success for Children and Parents Through Evidence-based Home Visiting Act

Floor Speech

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Madam Chair, across our country, there are thousands of children, thousands of families, that have a really big stake in what happens with this bill.

I support evidence-based home visiting programs, and I support them not just by talking about them, but by providing them the resources they need to reach more children and make a difference in their lives. This whole program, ``home visiting,'' is a little bit of a misnomer.

This is not about going out to pay a social visit, to join a club or something. This is about skilled professionals working with young parents to help them be the parents they want to be. It is about family values. It is about strengthening and protecting families, particularly disadvantaged families.

Our home visiting programs give these families the tools that they need. I have seen how successful they have been in San Antonio, in San Marcos, in Austin, and across Texas.

A story was shared with me recently when I met with Alaska and Jimmy Martinez from San Antonio. During their first year in college, Alaska became pregnant. She felt she was going to have to drop out of school, and then they met with Susan, with the Nurse-Family Partnership there in San Antonio, and she gave them some referrals and some assistance.

They were able to learn more about the development of their child and how they could prepare their family for that child's arrival.

Now, Alaska is about to finish her associate's degree. Jimmy is pursuing his business degree, and they are happy to have a beautiful 2- year-old son.

That is the way this program is supposed to work so people don't sink into poverty. They are lifted up and so are their children. This is just one of thousands of success stories from across the country--the family that unexpectedly finds they have a child with severe disabilities, or maybe just the more common experience of the family that has a baby who cries all night long, and they don't know what to do about it.

Too often, that is the kind of thing that ends up in a slap here, a slap there, and child abuse. Too often, it ends up with that child just being put in front of the television set instead of working with the child to deal with these real-life problems.

Some reforms were mentioned, alleged reforms, in this bill. I have served on this subcommittee through a number of terms of Congress. We have had some excellent witnesses, Republican and Democratic, and I have yet to hear a single witness call for a single one of the changes that they are proposing to impose on this program as obstacles to its success.

We haven't had an academic expert. We haven't had a stakeholder. We haven't had a single witness come forward and say: Please change this program so it cannot achieve the success that it is having today. This is an evidence-based program. What does that mean? It means it is based on fact, not just on hope or good intention, as a number of our programs are. It means there is peer-reviewed data showing that this program works to reduce child abuse and to solve other problems.

The chairman, the advocate for this bill, tells me that they recognize this in the great Republican blueprint, and they want to do more of this. Well, if they want to do more of this, why are they creating one obstacle after another and causing one group after another to oppose those changes?

What about the resources to get the job done? As so many of the Republican witnesses before our subcommittee have acknowledged, we are helping a fraction of the children who are eligible for these kind of services.

I think you could call this bill the Republican 6 percent solution, because about 94 percent of eligible families in America don't get a penny of assistance out of this program. This program that they say is so good, they want to praise it as an evidence-based program--and well they should, and well they have in the course of the several years I have served on the committee--this program is frozen at the same amount of funds that it had 5 years ago.

Though the need has grown, though the fraction of children who are served is minuscule compared with the need, they refuse to provide the resources to help other families like Alaska and Jimmy's. It is clear, we can't just throw money at this problem or any other, but sometimes the only substitute that I hear from my Republican colleagues is to throw words at the problem like we have heard today: caring, soothing, empathetic words, but words that are no substitute for meaningful action. Indeed, it is great to hear about support for an evidence-based program. Where is the evidence for these changes?

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Madam Chair, where is the evidence today? It couldn't be produced in committee. Where is the evidence for one of these changes? Where is the evidence for freezing this funding? We proposed to fully fund it, and I proposed to do it with a simple tax compliance measure that wouldn't have raised taxes on anyone, but it would have provided the resources for this home visiting program to do its intended purpose. This measure, as proposed, should be rejected, and we ought to support genuine home visiting that reaches more American families and protects them, just as it has for so many families in Texas.

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