Mississippi KIDS COUNT
The FCRU has been named the home of the Mississippi KIDS COUNT program by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. MS KIDS COUNT releases an annual Data Book and holds annual MS KIDS COUNT Summits. In doing so, MS KIDS COUNT provides accurate and non-partisan data, statistics and original research about the health, education, safety and well-being of Mississippi’s children to policymakers, educators, program administrators, parents, caregivers, advocates, and the general public.  MS KIDS COUNT also provides a forum for interested stakeholders to share concerns and solutions to the problems facing Mississippi’s children today.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
This Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded study is designed to evaluate recent state-level policies to prevent childhood obesity in Mississippi.  In 2007, the Legislature passed the Mississippi Healthy Students Act, which set forth policies to affect nutrition, as well as physical and health education standards in public schools.  This project is sponsored by the Center for Mississippi Health Policy and is expected to continue for five years. FCRU project staff will measure the attitudes and knowledge of Mississippi parents, legislators, school boards, State Boards of Health and Education members, and district health officers regarding obesity prevention and the implementation of the Healthy Students Act. 

HealthWorks!
HealthWorks! is an interactive children’s health facility in Tupelo, MS, scheduled to open early 2009. The goal of the program is to help children in grades K-8 understand the potential impact of their health-related choices. In partnership with North Mississippi Medical Center, the FCRU is designing and will conduct an evaluation of this program to determine participant satisfaction, as well as knowledge acquisition, retention and application. This multi-year project will yield data that will be analyzed over time.

Research Innovation and Development Grants in Economics (RIDGE)
The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) provides meal and snack reimbursements for childcare centers, which enable centers to provide nutritious foods for children who may face hunger and food insecurity at home. To explore the context of this federal program in Mississippi, the FCRU staff is conducting an in-depth process analysis of food environments in childcare centers and homes within one Mississippi Delta county. This analysis will focus on how food environments contribute to children’s health outcomes and what role CACFP plays in these outcomes, especially those related to body mass index. This project is funded by the USDA through the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Pandemic Flu: National Survey of Licensed Child Care Directors
This project involves a national needs assessment of licensed child care centers and will be used to guide future planning and resource development regarding child care preparation for seasonal/pandemic influenza. The needs assessment will be based on data collected from a SSRC telephone survey of 1,500 randomly selected child care centers from a national database of more than 92,000 centers compiled by the FCRU. Results from this survey will be reviewed and summarized to determine the extent to which the child care community is prepared to respond to an infectious outbreak of pandemic influenza. This project is funded by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

MS AAP Oral Health Project
The Pediatric Oral Health Project was established with a grant from the Dental Trade Alliance Foundation to the MS Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics. The MS Chapter AAP entered a partnership with the Social Science Research Center to develop a document that details the oral health status of young children in the Mississippi Delta, mapping of current pediatricians and pediatric dentists in the Delta, and other related data.

Mississippi Community-based Animal Assessment Pilot Study
This study is a collaboration of the FCRU and the Mississippi State College of Veterinary Medicine and involves several phases. In the first phase, key experts on pet overpopulation identified community-level project partners and developed community interview questions. For the second phase, community interviews in two Mississippi communities were conducted. Currently we are working with one of these communities on implementation of pet friendly community based programs. Future efforts will expand this to additional communities in Mississippi, and in addition, implement research on what programs and practices are most successful to increase spay/neuter rates, reduce pet overpopulation and ultimately eliminate the euthanasia of healthy, treatable pets in shelters in the communities.

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