Florida blocks Healthy Start

The federal government was poised to give the $4.9 million to programs around the state that provide in-home visits to parents in areas with high rates of premature babies, poverty, crime, substance abuse, joblessness, child abuse and other issues.

The in-home visits are designed to combat those problems by deploying professionals who teach parenting and other skills.

The Florida legislature blocked the state from accepting Healthy Start funding. It's a program that provides targeted, in-home education and other support to new parents who are in trouble, helping them learn how to properly care for their new children. It's proven highly effective, and is fully funded. So they're not saving the state any money, just screwing up the lives of hundreds of families that are benefitting (or would have benefitted) from the education and other assistance that this program provides.

For Dudley, the Clearwater woman in the program, she said the assistance was life-changing.

"My baby was a methadone baby," she said.

Her Healthy Start workers helped her with drug treatment, parenting classes, clothes and keeping her family together.

She wasn't happy to learn the grant money was turned down.

"If I had the money, I would pay them back tenfold and I would provide more," she said. "There's plenty of mothers out there that need this help."

As far as I can tell, the only logic is that they want to kill the program in order to force people to be dependent on the church instead of being able to rely on the government to help them. WTF do they think we created the government to do?

These people are crazy - harming kids, purely to pursue their political agenda.

Florida turns down $4.9 million from federal government designed to strengthen parenting.