Three-tier rating system for child care unveiled

— Three stars is the new top rating available to Arkansas’ nearly 2,900 licensed child-care programs that can choose to participate in the Better Beginnings program improvement and rating system introduced Monday by the state Department of Human Services.

“It is a voluntary system for folks who are caring for children - early care as well as school-aged care - to incrementally improve the quality of their programs,”said Tonya Russell, director of the state agency’s Child Care and Early Childhood Education Division.

The program has the potential to affect some 115,000 children from newborn to school age.

Each level in the threetier Better Beginnings system requires additional staff training and greater developmental, academic and health resources for children than is required at the previous tier.

The state will provide much of the training, guidelines and other types of support to the providers, which include center-based care programs, family child care and school-based programs.

The rating system is intended to assist parents in selecting child-care programs for their children.

The requirements for the providers, as well as a checklist for parents to use in visiting care programs and the ratings for the different programs, are at the new Better Beginnings website: ARBetterBeginnings.com.

Ratings for the programs can be accessed by clickingon the Arkansas map link at the bottom of the Better Beginnings home page.

All state-licensed childcare programs that met the state’s quality standards before this year’s launch of the Better Beginnings system have been converted to threestar programs, Russell said.

“They have a year in which we will work with them to determine if they need to meet any new or additional requirements,” she said.

The importance of highquality child-care programs was the focus of the day-longBetter Beginnings conference hosted by the Child Care and Early Childhood Education Division for about 150 childcare program providers and state legislators at Philander Smith College.

Dr. Joshua Sparrow, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and associate director of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center, told the audience that research shows that a baby’s ability to learn becomes evident within days of being born.

That learning occurs when the child interacts with a caring, energetic parent or other caregiver who talks and plays with them, Sparrow said.

“There is more rapid brain growth in the first three years of life than at any other time but there is little investment in that,” Sparrow said. “Babies are wired to learn but the stimulation has to be there.”

Bill Millett, founder and president Scope View Strategic Advantage, which is a consulting agency to corporations, told the audience that student achievement in the United States has fallen far from the top in global rankings and that the current generation of complacent Americans is in danger “of leaving being a lesser America than what we were born into.”

Education initiatives such as the federal No Child Left Behind Act and its emphasis on math and literacy have stifled student creativity, he said. And, greater restrictions on immigration have limited scientific and other advancements that previously resulted from people who moved to the United States.

Millett said that early education programs for children are critical if students are to succeed in general and higher education.

“If don’t get the launch right, you can’t expect the other stages to go well,” Millett said. “We have no American kids to waste. We need to give every kid a great start,” he said.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 10/26/2010

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