Smart Start is a multi-disciplinary, comprehensive, community-based initiative to serve North Carolina children under age 6 and their families to ensure that all children enter school healthy and prepared to succeed. To achieve this, local county partnerships have focused both their attention and their funds on three major areas of service implementation: child care, family programs, and health services. The evaluation data collection strategies have included measuring changes in child care quality, family functioning, and children's receipt of health services, as well as the long-term outcome of school success. The most notable recent finding is the significantly higher quality of child care as observed in randomly selected preschool classrooms in the pioneer Smart Start counties in 1996-97 compared to 1994-95. This report details the four main goals of Smart Start: (1) children are healthy and prepared to succeed in school; (2) families effectively fulfill their role as primary providers, nurturers, and teachers; (3) high quality, affordable services for children will be available; and (4) North Carolina counties value children and families by providing options and resources, and encouraging collaboration. Related to each goal, the report presents the main data collection strategies being used to evaluate progress towards the goal, followed by brief summaries of recent results and key findings from earlier reports. (JPB)