What is the Early Head Start Child Care Partnership Grant (EHS-CCP)?
The EHS-CCP Grant allows Early Head Start programs to work alongside local, existing childcare centers, including family childcare settings. The goal of this grant is to seek out ways to fund more and more birth-to-five programs, increasing accessibility to high-quality child care to working families across the United States.
Where did the Early Head Start Child Care Partnership Grant come from?
This grant has been set-aside by The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the government branch that “promotes the economic and social well-being of families, children, individuals, and communities with partnerships, funding, guidance, training, and technical assistance.” Two of ACF’s programs include: expanding access to high-quality Child Care to families, and developing Early Learning and Development systems (like Head Start).
Two years ago this grant funded almost 300 grantees, but this year Congress has increased funding, further increasing the chances of low-income children to receive high-quality child care.
As a company that believes in the importance of high-quality early education for all children, we are poised and ready to support you and your program apply for this grant.
So, how can Teachstone help?
Submitting an application can be difficult and we’re here to help. We wish you the best of luck as you take an important step toward improving access to high-quality childcare to children in your area.
Whether you are writing your transition plan, preparing to return, or have already returned to in-person learning, you, like many other educational leaders, are likely facing many challenges and unknowns.
As you continue to craft and refine your plans, reflecting on the considerations below can help you more effectively build a blueprint for a successful reopening.
On Wednesday, September 23, the Office of Head Start (OHS) announced that it will be suspending CLASS reviews for Fiscal Year (FY) 2021. We sincerely hope this news relieves some of the stress our Head Start partners have felt as they grapple with new challenges related to pandemic conditions.
It is also our hope that programs will use this time to provide specific CLASS support to staff in order to strengthen interactions, regardless of the delivery model in which they are serving children.
At Teachstone our mission is to help every child reach their full potential by measuring and improving the interactions that matter most. For the last decade our measurement tool, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) has been used in the Office of Head Start’s (OHS) Designation Renewal System (DRS). The use of CLASS in the DRS has helped to drive important improvements in children’s classroom experiences—but we are incredibly excited by recent changes to the DRS rules that will enhance the use of CLASS not just as a measure, but as a tool to support teachers and leaders as they work to improve quality—ensuring that every child in their program has access to the powerful teacher-child interactions that drive development and learning.
In the wake of the widespread civil unrest after the killing of George Floyd, the national conversation about the inequities in the educational opportunities provided white students and students of color has been amplified. Due to racial and socioeconomic segregation, Black students, and other students of color, are more likely to attend poorly funded schools. EdBuild, a non-profit focused on fair and equitable school funding, reports that high poverty school districts that predominantly enroll children of color receive on average, $1,600 less per student than the national average. By their calculations, there is a $23,000,000,000 gap between funding for schools that primarily serve high poverty Black students and those that predominantly serve white students. Schools that predominantly serve high poverty white students, only receive $1440 less per student (EdBuild, 2019).