Child Care and Early Education at CLASP

Ensuring Quality Care for Babies

The supply of high-quality infant and toddler child care is limited, particularly for low-income families. While most states provide child care assistance through vouchers or certificates, states have the option of contracting directly with providers to expand infant/toddler care for low-income families.

Based on interviews with state policymakers, a new paper from CLASP, Ensuring Quality Care for Low-Income Babies: Contracting Directly with Providers to Expand and Improve Infant and Toddler Care, explains how states are using contracts:

• to create or stabilize care in particular communities or for specific populations;
• to create child care slots meeting quality standards important for infants and toddlers;
• to extend the day for infants and toddlers served in Early Head Start; and
• to improve the quality of infant/ toddler family child care.

A look at infants and toddlers in CCDBG

The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) is the primary source of federal funding for child care subsidies for low-income working families and funds to improve child care quality. In FY 2006, nearly 500,000 infants and toddlers received CCDBG-funded child care assistance in an average month, comprising approximately 28 percent of all children receiving CCDBG. The share of children receiving CCDBG who are infants and toddlers varies from state to state. Arkansas serves the greatest share with over half (55 percent) of children under the age of 3; California serves the smallest share (19 percent). Funds earmarked to improve the quality of infant and toddler care comprise only about 1 percent of federal and state CCDBG spending.

For more on the youngest children served in CCDBG, read CLASP's latest fact sheet: Infants and Toddlers in the Child Care and Development Block Grant Program.

New pre-kindergarten class will benefit refugee children

"I didn't know about Pre-K registration and when I tried to get in there were no more openings at the school."

That is what a mom from Kurdistan told Refugee Family Services (RFS) in Stone Mountain, Georgia during a parent interview conducted for their "Refugee Parent Voices" project. The project was funded by CLASP as part of our "Breaking Down Barriers" work.

While Georgia's pre-kindergarten program is universally available to all 4-year-olds, waiting lists persist and in many cases recently arrived immigrants and refugees, lacking knowledge about how to navigate the enrollment process or arriving late in the registration period, are effectively shut out of programs. Every year, RFS assists and registers refugee children in Georgia Pre-K—but they are able to serve only a fraction of the families that need support.

In their interviews, RFS found that refugee families had different needs from other immigrant families, and that few programs had the information and resources to meet these needs.  To fill this need, RFS applied to the state to become a provider of the pre-kindergarten program, and this August, Refugee Family Services will inaugurate the first pre-kindergarten program in Georgia intended for use principally by refugee children. This program will allow these children access to a high-quality pre-kindergarten program that is prepared to competently meet their cultural and linguistic needs and is situated in an organization that is experienced in meeting the family support needs of diverse refugee communities. 

The pre-kindergarten class will be filled by children from Somalia, Sudan, Honduras, Congo, Burundi, Iraq, Burma, and Vietnam. Most of the children were born in refugee camps.  For the first time, they will have the opportunity to participate in a pre-kindergarten program that is designed with them and their families in mind.