Expanding Infant and Toddler Care in Texas through Early Head Start

With a coordinated prenatal-to-five system in mind, Early Head Start was the logical place to start with its comprehensive services for pregnant moms and children from birth to age three and high quality performance standards. According to CCA, Early Head Start spaces were so coveted, families drove from 20 miles away to access services when they were accepted into the program. While the base model is Early Head Start, CCA blends funding and services to ensure flexibility of services and meet the unique needs of each family.

Later, when Waddell was reaching out to the local child care community who expressed concern that their paid slots may be at risk, she explained the economic position of Early Head Start-eligible families: “Early Head Start families cannot afford the child care programs; they are families who would go unserved.”

Services for pregnant women, infants, and toddlers which require shifting Head Start funding, strategic planning, and the development and implementation of new processes to ensure the Early Head Start Performance Standards are met. The HS2EHS converted slots create more infant and toddler options within the community and are particularly viable when state or local funding preschool programs are meeting a significant share of demand for Head Start’s preschool services.

Expand infant and toddler options by blending services from providers who participate in the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) with Early Head Start programs, to enhance early education and support for low-income children and their families. The partnerships provide quality programming and flexibility, often through full-day and full-year services, to meet the needs of working families or those in education and career training programs.

CCA’s Chief Financial Officer Karanae Spradlin used these strategies to develop an efficient cost model to build stakeholder buy-in and to amend contracts with existing providers to create new slots. To extend the day for working families, they examined current child care options through CCDF and explored how to provide additional hours at the beginning and/or end of the day. The modeling allowed them to make the argument that a one-time investment with federal funding would pay off through decades of returns.

One of the biggest barriers CCA and the BRAC faced was infrastructure. Old and poorly located spaces do not allow for convenient and equitable access for infants, toddlers, and their families. Typically, there are no public dollars available for early childhood facilities and renovations. With this unique one-time opportunity, CCA and the BRAC gave careful consideration to placement of the infant and toddler slots and classrooms and removed these barriers to access. Returning to the Early Head Start and Head Start data, they examined locations, deserts, and community needs and worked toward creative solutions.

Modular buildings are being constructed to create new centers in locations where they are needed most. Modular buildings can be built quickly and the space customized to meet CCA’s needs. According to Waddell: “Modular buildings go up fast and can be customized to allow families to make decisions for the outside and play areas.”

CCA also identified six Head Start classrooms in school buildings that will be converted to infant and toddler classrooms. They looked at other school-based programs to focus on teen parents and children of non-instructional staff who may need early education and care, such as cafeteria workers. They are currently exploring working with the local community college, to find space to support young students who may need child care support to finish their education.

The team hired a consulting firm to use data, technology, and analytics to identify core families and find locations to place the new classrooms so that it meets families where they are and meet their needs. They examined the typical course schedules of college students, eligible parents’ work places and non-traditional employment patterns. They considered the location of grandparents and other family members who may provide transportation for the children to child care. They learned the best location is not necessarily where eligible families live, but all of these other considerations that make child care more accessible and convenient.

CCA served as the early childhood education and care experts, guiding the BRAC on identifying EHS as the infant toddler model, how to define, measure, and improve quality, and how to create classrooms that will serve children, families, and teachers for years to come. Because they serve children and families with the greatest needs, they knew they wanted trauma-informed classrooms, but what does that look like and is that enough? They consulted varying points of view, including Montessori specialists, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and prekindergarten programs. With so much invested, they wanted to get the classrooms “right” on the first try.

They started with the basics, identifying what young children need and designed classrooms to match. This meant more space per child in the classrooms, using neutral and calming colors for the walls and furniture, and creating natural play areas. They put together three-dimensional models so it became easier to envision the space and look at ways they could enhance it. They spoke to teachers and parents about what they needed. Teachers felt they needed more windows, for example, not necessarily to the outside but even between classrooms so they could see each other and feel less isolated by classroom walls. Teachers needed a place to store their personal belongings when they came to work, a place to rest during their breaks, and a charging station for their electronic devices and phones. They looked at the individual wellness needs of teachers. In one case, it meant making sure the space was large enough to accommodate a teacher’s mobility scooter.

Parents were consulted as well. They asked for a covered drop off area for days with inclement weather. They requested a stroller or car seat “garage” to store them during the day when the pickup parent/grandparent is different from the one who dropped off the child in the morning. Finally, they asked for a place to store their bags and phones when in the center volunteering.

The overall goal of CCA is to create Early Head Start spaces that will move beyond current practices and are ready for future needs through careful planning.

With tens of millions of dollars directed toward the project, ensuring they are invested wisely was a primary goal. CCA and the BRAC had to ensure commitment from the community. Messaging was key to ensuring the plan would be implemented fully.

Investors and decision-makers were provided with financial modeling to outline the upfront costs and predict the future return on investments. Costs associated with serving infants and toddlers are often high compared to preschool costs. CCA worked with financial institutions and other stakeholders to help them understand the true cost of serving infants and toddlers, often comparing the cost to families to educate young children with the costs of a college education, an expense a family saves for years to afford.

At the child-level, the investment may look costly. However, CCS helped stakeholders to visualize the impact at the classroom level as well as in the broad number of the community’s most vulnerable children to be served over ten years.The impact of adding 50 classrooms over ten years provides a robust return on the initial investment. .

CCA also wanted to assure valued community child care providers understood the expansion efforts so that they could see the need. They engaged in dialogue with child care programs to help them understand that Early Head Start was not competing for families, but would help to serve an unserved population, with few or no options. Tangibly, they reached out to existing child care programs centers to secure their support prior to any project goals being set or press releases issued. Reaching out to current providers was an important step in creating early childhood community buy-in, especially among other strong providers. As Waddell noted: “[Having these discussions] helped to defuse the worry, underscoring that we are adding to the community, not competing with existing quality programs.”

For Scott, Censuring quality early education and care comes down to data. Her goal has always been to establish policies for collecting strong data, working with staff on the ground to understand the importance of the information they are collecting, and then teaching them how to use it to impact instruction and overall quality.

Good data collection is especially important in early childhood education, where high teacher turnover is an unfortunate reality. Therefore, CCA builds capacity to gather and utilize data at the director and manager level where the turnover is lower. That builds decision-making power at the campus level rather than from headquarters.

The data points CCA to families who may benefit the most from EHS services. They partner with other organizations, such as Catholic Charities, to find and serve the most vulnerable families, especially pregnant women where children may receive the highest EHS dose of services and support from the beginning.

The Early Head Start Performance Standards set the tone for quality. CCA uses multiple data points, such as the standards to examine child development outcomes, Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS®) scores for teacher-child interactions, and other environmental data points to identify organizational conditions, leadership support, and classroom environments to push for higher quality and stronger child outcomes.

CCS ensures these same quality indicators reach beyond the Early Head Start/Head Start classrooms and into other child care centers. They look to see what works in Early Head Start/Head Start centers and expand that into other areas of the community. They work with parents and community organizations that may have varying expectations to frame the standards and measures and why they are important to quality and build strong educational experiences for children and their families. They work with child care providers to incorporate quality indicators in the quality rating and improvement systems.