PathWays PA Policy Blog

FREE DENTAL CARE FOR CHILDREN & TEENS! During Spring Break April 15th - 22nd 2019 Call for appointments starting April 1st 215-563-5848 x21 Give Kids a Smile! Participating dental offices providing free care in Philadelphia, Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks and Chester counties. Give Kids a Smile is for children who don’t have insurance or have not seen a dentist in the last 6 months. For mo PCCY.org/smileday . re information visit

From our friends at PCCY . Smile Day is free dental care for children 1-18 years old, particularly children who are uninsured, have no dental insurance or haven’t been to the dentist in over 6 months. Children will receive care in dentist’s offices in Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. Call PCCY to make an appointment (in any language) starting on March 12th at 215-563-5848 x21. Read more here !

Affordable dental care is hard to find for many low-income families, including those served by PathWays PA. If your family needs help getting dental care, Smile Day may be for you! From our friends at PCCY: FREE dental care is available to kids 0 – 18 years old the week of March 30 – April 3 during Spring Break for PCCY’s “Give Kids a Smile Day”! Two dental offices in Broomall and Chester City are also providing free care on March 26 and 27 during school hours, so preschool age kids are particularly welcome for those spots. More information and flyers are available on our website in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin and Bengali - http://www.pccy.org/resource/give-kids-a-smile-day/ . Interested in PathWays PA blog posts on similar topics? 10/24/14 - New Policy Brief Shows Highest Number Ever of Homeless Students in United States 6/30/14 - Ask Senators to Co-sponsor the Bi-Partisan Summer Meals Act of 2014 3/29/14 - Give Kids a Smile Day-FREE dental care for childre...

From our friends at PCCY Give Kids A Smile Day (GKAS) is a national effort of the American Dental Association (ADA) to connect kids to free oral health care and to establish dental homes for them. FREE dental care will be available for children in the Upper Darby, Havertown and West Philadelphia areas on Wednesday, April 16 and Friday, April 18. This special event is especially for children who have not had a dental exam in the last six months or who do not have health insurance. Participating dentists will provide free screenings and cleanings. The ultimate goal of Smile Day is for families to find a dental home for their children. Please call PCCY for participating dentists and Appointments at : (215) 563-5848 x32

From our friends at PHENND. Access to dental care remains an important issue as more than 25 percent of children in the United States between the ages of two and five are affected by tooth decay; this figure increases to over fifty percent among children 12 to 15 years old. Additionally, approximately 16% of children ages 6 to 19 went untreated for dental caries due to lack of dental care access. In recognition of February as National Children’s Dental Health Month, Public Health Management Corporation has published a report highlighting data from PHMC’s Community Health Data Base’s 2010 Southeastern Pennsylvania (SEPA) Household Health Survey on dental care access of children between the ages of 4 and 17 in the region. To read the report, go here:  http://www.chdbdata.org/datafindings-details.asp?id=97

Special Announcements It’s Not too Late to Join PathWays PA for our PathWays to the Starts 32nd Anniversary Celebration Sports-tacular!   PathWays PA will celebrate 32 years of services to low-income women, children and families this year by hosting the PathWays to the Stars 32nd Anniversary Celebration Sports-tacular. WHEN: Tuesday, November 9, 2010, 6:30 – 9:00PM WHERE: Radisson King of Prussia’s Waterford Ballroom The silent auction will feature Phillies, Flyers, Eagles and Sixers tickets and memorabilia. Also, as part of the festivities, we will present this year's Trailblazer Awards to five inspiring individuals. To read about the 2010 Trailblazer Honorees, click here . To bid on silent auction items, click here . Tickets to the event are $50 and may be purchased online . Further information on corporate and individual sponsorships can be found here . Federal Support Child Care and Head Start There is still time to sign-on to the letter to Congress to help ...

State Budget Governor Calls for a Special Session To address the added funding needed for road and bridge repairs, Governor Rendell will convene a special session of the Legislature starting May 4. The special session is necessary as federal officials rejected proposals to place tolls on I-80, which would have generated an estimated $472 million for road, bridges, and mass transit. Without that funding, there is a large hole in the state’s transportation budget. The Governor is hopeful that the special session will only focus on the issue of transportation funding. Some potential proposals to raise the revenue include: leasing the Pennsylvania Turnpike to private companies, an increase in the state's 31-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax, an increase in the car registration fee, enacting a tax on the natural gas in the Marcellus Share, enacting private-public partnerships on road or bridge projects, where a private firm would build and operate a road and likely charge ...

If you do an internet search on cosleeping (the practice of a child, often an infant, sleeping in the same bed as a parent), people both for and against the practice show up immediately in the search results. WHYY will host a webchat on cosleeping on Tuesday, October 27, to discuss both sides of the story. Those against cosleeping point to statistics showing that SIDS as well as accidental suffocation and strangulation are heightened when parents and children sleep together, while those for cosleeping believe it improves parent-child bonding and encourages breast-feeding. Here at PathWays PA, we continue to work with parents to warn them of the dangers of cosleeping, since many parents feel they are aware (even when asleep) of their child's location in the bed, or think that accidents will not happen to them. Unfortunately, parents are not always aware, while their beds hold many hazards for children, such as space where a child could become wedged or too-soft bedding. We'r...

The most common chronic disease among children is something that can be prevented with a toothbrush, floss, and a visit to the dentist. More than three quarters of adolescents are suffering from tooth decay, yet a rising number of children are not going to the dentist and there is little push to include dental care in current health care reform. Tooth decay can be very painful for children and leads to expensive procedures from the filling of cavities to root canals. When minor tooth decay and dental problems are ignored or untreated, they lead to more painful and expensive procedures , and worse. Not long ago, a 12-year-old boy died from the failure to treat a dental infection, which spread to his brain . A routine $80 extraction may have saved his life, but without insurance, the boy did not receive care. Insurance coverage is critical to obtaining dental care. A survey from the Public Health Management Corporation found that in Southeastern Pennsylvania, 40 percent of children...

PA Budget We are almost one week into the fiscal year and Pennsylvania is still without a budget. It is imperative that we continue to let our legislators know what programs Pennsylvania cannot afford to cut. Industry Partnerships and Child Care Work Subsides are two of those programs. Industry Partnerships provide training for individuals so they can find jobs that pay a self-sufficient wage and Child Care Work Subsidies make it possible for parents or care givers to afford to go to work. Until the budget is complete, keep reminding your representative of the critical programs that cannot be cut! College Cost Reduction Act – Income Based Repayment and Forgiveness of Student Loans For everyone with mounds of student debt, and even those with just a little student debt, today there might be some relief and assistance. Last year Congress passed the College Cost Reduction Act , which put into place the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan with a special provision on loan forgiveness fo...