State moves to improve child care

SHINING BRIGHT: Debbie Durant, director of the Smith Hill Early Childhood Learning Center, works with children at the Providence nonprofit. She praises the BrightStars system for helping the center raise its rating. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
SHINING BRIGHT: Debbie Durant, director of the Smith Hill Early Childhood Learning Center, works with children at the Providence nonprofit. She praises the BrightStars system for helping the center raise its rating. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

At the Smith Hill Early Childhood Learning Center in Providence, enrollment for children has almost doubled over two years with improved ratings from BrightStars, a nonprofit that is expanding to meet the demand for quality child care.
Nonprofit Smith Hill Director Debbie Durant says the enrollment of children up to age 5 has climbed from 45 in 2012 to capacity at 84 today, with a waiting list of 13. In citing the increase, Durant praised the BrightStars system, which rates child care centers, school-aged programs and home-based providers in Rhode Island, for helping Smith Hill improve its rating from two in 2012, just above meeting basic needs, to four out of a possible five for exemplary care today.
“It’s made a huge difference,” Durant said of the rating system, “raising the quality. The parents see it, and they refer other families here.”
With $3.4 million in federal and state educational funding, the Warwick-based BrightStars system has since November added 13 staffers to its core of four, said Lisa A. Hildebrand, the BrightStars director.
As it expands to work with a field of nearly 1,000 child care centers, home-based providers and educational programs, the need for higher-quality child care correlates to the need for access to it in a workforce in which parents need it to stay employed or return to work, state officials say.
“Having access to reliable and high-quality child care is extremely important to working parents,” said Rick Brooks, director of the Governor’s Workforce Board. “Often lack of access to affordable, quality care is a real barrier to taking a job.”
According to a 2013 report on “Parents and the High Cost of Child Care,” compiled by the nonprofit advocacy group, Child Care Aware of America, surveys of employers show that “the availability of quality child care improves productivity and reduces absenteeism and turnover.” And that’s apparent to state leaders.
Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee and state lawmakers put into place two pilot programs in the fiscal 2013 budget that are helping ensure the availability of child care to the workforce, according to Sandra Powell, director of the R.I. Department of Human Services, which helps administer the BrightStars contract.
A $150,000 program that partners with DHS and state Department of Labor and Training extends access to child care assistance to individuals who are in training programs to return to the workforce, Powell said. Another $1.5 million pilot allows families with low incomes who earn more money as a result of overtime or a promotion to maintain their child care assistance up until they reach 225 percent of the poverty level. Before that, if a family earned any money above 180 percent of the poverty level, they lost all access to child care assistance, Powell said.
“As of this fiscal year, 7,038 families accessed child care assistance through our department, and what we know is those families would not be able to maintain employment more than likely without the availability of child care assistance,” said Powell.
Getting the $50 million Race to the Top grant in 2011, of which the BrightStars funding was a part, had been contingent upon including a plan for early child care ratings, explained Deborah A. Gist, the state’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education.
Rhode Island was one of only six states to get Race to the Top funding for both K-12 education and early-childhood learning, Gist said.
The three-year contract, implemented in June 2013 with DHS, includes $2.4 million from Race to the Top and $1 million from the RIDE Child Care Development Fund.
RIDE and other state agencies worked collaboratively to get the grant and implement it, said Powell.
In addition, $14 million has been made available through Race to the Top to launch The Center for Early Learning Professionals in Warwick, which oversees professional development, training and grant funding for BrightStars clients, said Ready to Learn Providence Director Leslie Gell.
Ready to Learn has partnered with a vendor, the Education Development Center of Waltham, Mass., to provide professional-development services, training and funding resources through this center, which opened in January. Gell is center co-director along with co-director Karen Pucciarelli.
Pucciarelli cited professional development offered now through her office that focuses on teaching strategies, responsive curriculum and other topics germane to child care. The list will change over time and will grow “as we tune into what’s out there in the community and where are the gaps,” she said. According to Melissa Emidy, RIDE’s Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grant officer, the number of participating providers has increased from 230 to nearly 1,000 because of the grant.
Those 230 child care programs had been participating voluntarily. But now, any group or business that gets state funding through DHS is required to obtain a rating and encouraged to pursue recommended improvement, Emidy said.
Regardless of whether the child care provider is a for-profit business or, like Smith Hill, a nonprofit, the same standards apply, Hildebrand said.
BrightStars is managed by the Rhode Island Association for the Education of Young Children, a state affiliate of the National AEYC, and partially supported by the United Way of Rhode Island.
According to Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director of Rhode Island Kids Count, a statewide children’s policy organization, three groups – the United Way, Kids Count and DHS – started developing a rating system through a steering committee as early as 2005. After a planning and development period that spanned three years, the state AEYC began rating child care programs in 2009, Bryant said.
Since then, BrightStars has been ranking child care centers, family child care providers and school-aged programs for young children in ratings that span everything from basic health and safety to high-quality care, said Hildebrand. Today, DHS funds cover youths up to age 12 while the state AEYC has a mission of handling children from birth through age 8, and Race to the Top funds cover up to age 5, Hildebrand said.
At Smith Hill, February’s level four rating reflects that the center now has teachers with early-childhood-learning credentials. The passing grade came from submitting to an “environmental” review of a classroom as well as the grounds, said Durant.
Of the nearly 1,000 participants currently, 309 are larger early-childhood-learning centers and 571 are family child care businesses run out of a private home, said Emidy. The remainder comprises educational programs for young children, she said.
Once the Race to the Top funding runs out, it is not clear whether it will be extended, Hildebrand said.
“We know this large pot of money won’t be around forever,” she said. •

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