Despite the critical role early childhood education plays in brain development and lifelong success, the nation is grappling with an escalating child care crisis that strains families, communities, and economies alike.
With 14.4 million young children and all their guardians in the workforce, families are struggling with costly and hard-to-find child care. Even before COVID-19, nearly half of U.S. children under five lived in child care deserts, and the pandemic has only worsened the situation.
The Administration for Children & Families (ACF) provides time-limited funding for qualifying states. Through Preschool Development Grants (PDG), states are to enhance early childhood systems, improve access to high-quality care and education, and support the early childhood workforce. This is a tall order, but Resultant can help.
The goal of PDG
The ACF wants states to coordinate and align existing programs within state’s early childhood care and education (ECCE) mixed delivery system. These systems nationally tend to be fragmented, siloed, and underfunded.
The challenges states need to address include:
- Families are overwhelmed not only with paying for child care, but where to even start looking.
- Communities contend with ongoing workforce shortages they can’t resolve.
- States struggle to keep with immense amounts of data without an easy way to coordinate it all.
- States don’t know how to get important datasets that are missing but essential for changing program trajectories.
Data is at the basis of all PDG priorities. The grant requires an updated needs assessment and strategic plan; good data is an essential component of creating these.
This is where Child Care Pulse comes in. Your state’s data already holds the answers to most of your pressing child care questions, but how do you make that data useful and actionable to support children, families, and educators?
What is Child Care Pulse?
Child Care Pulse takes data your state already has and makes sense of it. It works with your existing systems to provide real-time data about the gap between child care supply and demand.
It connects families by providing access to accurate, up-to-date information that populates user-friendly, intuitive dashboards and includes relevant factors like age groups, localities, special needs accommodations, and provider subsidy participation and certifications. Families can even map out their route to work to find open child care slots along the way.
Child Care Pulse enhances communities by helping leaders understand the current state of child care to make impactful, data-driven decisions, such as where to build workforce pipeline and what communities need infant/toddler care the most.
Finally, Child Care Pulse empowers states through consistent insight into the balance between child care supply and demand and the factors that impact it. Through this, policy makers can anticipate where demand will shift to effectively plan for future child care needs. States can more precisely direct their resources and create targeted remediation.
Additionally, it results in a decrease in the workload and time needed for federal reporting for both agencies and providers. The data-centric nature of Child Care Pulse helps ensure Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) and PDG recipients meet requirements.
How can Child Care Pulse help PDGs meet requirements?
Child Care Pulse is a valuable resource PDG recipients can tap into to meet their program requirements and objectives. Here’s how PDGs can utilize this platform effectively:
Family Participation
Some family members must leave the workforce when they can’t find child care. The search for child care is time consuming, with outdated availability information.
Child Care Pulse enables access to easy-to-use systems for parents. The family-facing portal makes the search for child care dramatically easier and provides accuracy that was not previously available. Families can search along their routes to work or school for open child care slots that fit their criteria, including ages, special needs accommodations, or provider subsidy participation.
The integration Child Care Pulse provides between currently siloed, disparate systems can enable automatic eligibility determination and a functionality for universal four-year-old applications can also be built in, making it a one-stop application portal.
Support ECE Workforce
The platform can assist in identifying areas where workforce support is needed, allowing policy makers to allocate resources and training effectively to enhance the skills and competencies of early childhood educators.
Child Care Pulse can compare licensed capacity versus currently enrolled, and drill down into communities to determine what workforce solutions need to be targeted where to increase availability. States can identify child providers who may benefit from professional development opportunities and support efforts to improve the overall quality of early childhood education.
Support ECE Program Alignment
Child Care Pulse creates an integrated birth-through-five (B–5) system without requiring any change of current user systems—programs can keep using the software tools they currently use and the state can integrate that data. Additionally, providers without technology access can enter data in simple ways such as sending a text message, increasing the potential for every provider’s participation.
The platform allows states to identify areas of shortages for infants and toddlers, underserved children, children with special needs, and more. It can create multiple dashboards to help states target priority populations.
Access to Provider Information
States can review detailed child care providers profile information, including their licensing status, inspection reports, and compliance history to help ensure any collaborations or referrals align with high-quality standards.
Track Program Impact: Data from Child Care Connect can be used to track the impact of PDG initiatives on the childcare sector. By analyzing changes in provider quality, availability, and other metrics, PDG recipients can evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions.
Use your PDG to provide ongoing benefits for families and the state
Child Care Pulse provides PDG recipients with valuable tools and information to enhance program quality, support workforce development, improve access and equity, and ensure compliance with program requirements. States can also use their past needs assessment and strategic plan to drive data collection and coordination for the future with this platform. Investing PDG funding into a Child Care Pulse implementation provides an ROI with ongoing benefits long after the time-limited PDG expires.
Connect with a team member today for a demonstration to show how Child Care Pulse can help your state maximize your PDG.
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About the Author
Amy Smigielski
Early Care and Education Manager @ Resultant
With over 15 years of experience, Amy is first and always an early childhood practitioner. She began her career as a teacher, first educating children in the K-12 system before moving to the Head...
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