This story begins: Daily Yonder.
Chris Nelson is a kindergarten teacher in rural Vermont, just a few miles from the Canadian border. School or nursery Most people would think of a state- or locally funded preschool, but her 3- and 4-year-old students are integrated into a 5-star rated in-home child care program where she also cares for younger children and a few others who come after school until their working parents can pick them up.
Many of these parents have to drive more than an hour to get to a center or school-based preschool program. The state will cover 10 hours of tuition per week.In contrast, Nelson’s program operates 12 hours a day to cover commuting times for parents and non-traditional work hours for shift and seasonal workers.
Nelson wants to continue her kindergarten education, and her children’s parents are hoping to receive $3,800 in free tuition from the state for enrolling in Nelson’s program. Vermont School Board Insurance Trust VSBIT, which insures schools and preschool programs, effectively excludes home-based child care providers from participating because the $2 million in insurance they recommend (based on the needs of the school district) is not available to home-based child care providers (also known as Family Child Care Providers or FCCs). Nelson reported the issue to state child care regulators.. in Note Announced to school superintendents in mid-June, the Vermont Department of Education and Welfare Policy allows local education departments to waive the insurance requirement for home-based preschool programs that cannot purchase or afford the insurance recommended by the VSBIT. Because this policy change came very late — just two months before the start of the 2024 school year, when most school districts have already made decisions about partnering with private preschool providers — it remains to be seen how many home-based child care providers will be able to offer preschool this year.
Vermont, Like many statesteeth, Blended delivery models in preschool educationIt allows state preschool funding to be applied to a variety of existing settings, including home-based programs. However, according to the National Institute for Early Childhood Education and Research (NIEER), 2023 Kindergarten Current Status YearbookIn 2022-2023, more than 60 percent of preschoolers served are in public schools and not in private programs or home-based child care options. All these programs combined serve only 44 percent of eligible 4-year-olds and 17 percent of eligible 3-year-olds. More than half of 3- and 4-year-olds are not yet in preschool. For many families, especially in rural areas, the barriers to paying for and sending their children to a preschool program are simply too great.
Achieving “universal” access to quality preschool education will require large, long-term public investments ($33 billion, according to NIEER). In the short term, states can increase access by leveraging existing infrastructure to provide preschool in home-based programs that already serve many rural families. Policy experts say: Ericsson Research Institute and Nier It recommends “meaningfully” including and supporting home-based child care providers in the expansion and implementation of publicly funded kindergarten as a promising first step to increasing access, especially in states where more than 50 percent of the population lives in kindergarten. Parenting Desert.a New Initiatives Led by Home Grown, a national funder collaborative focused on improving the quality and access of in-home child care, the initiative will partner with NIEER to help state, city, county and tribal government leaders integrate in-home child care into their preschool programs.
State efforts at blended-delivery models have stalled because many states, like Vermont, have governance structures that increasingly view pre-kindergarten as just an extra grade, with regulations and funding that follow the elementary education template. This includes layers of requirements for teacher licensing, classroom environments and administrative oversight. Home-based child care, meanwhile, is overseen by the Department of Social Services and has different standards for licensing and oversight. Ashton Clemons, a former state representative who co-chaired the North Carolina Legislature’s Early Childhood Education Caucus, said this has led to a lack of consensus among states. “Mismatch” This is an effort to distinguish between parents of infants and toddlers and parents who teach preschool children.
“If you give parents a voucher and let them go wherever they want, a lot of parents will choose FCC for not just toddler care, but preschool care,” says Rachel Byman, a licensed in-home child care provider in Bay Point, California, a low-income, largely immigrant town about an hour from San Francisco. She says California also has a blended child care model, but her county has no. Family Childcare Home Education Network The bill would allow in-home child care providers like hers to participate in California’s subsidized preschool program, so that families who want publicly funded preschool in her county would have to leave her program and enroll in another facility.
Families who prefer a home-based childcare environment The most underserved and hardest to access“Families of color, people living in rural communities, people who speak languages other than English and people who work non-traditional hours are among the most vulnerable,” said Alexandra Patterson, director of policy and strategy. Homegrowna national collaboration of funders supporting family child care, said in a statement that “excluding these providers from the formal preschool system will further alienate the families and providers who need these resources most.”
Another major barrier to access is that working parents require at least two to six hours of care per day for the 180 days of the typical preschool year. Many eligible working parents struggle to send multiple children of different ages to different schools or cannot find available preschools within commuting distance of their workplace or home. Home-based preschools, on the other hand, are usually integrated into comprehensive child care programs for multiple children of different ages and are open all day, all year round. This family-like environment allows This report from Ericsson Instituteprovides continuity and stability for children, culturally and linguistically sensitive care and individualized education, and fosters community connections and relationships where families rely on each other and their children’s teachers for support.
Nelson’s nature- and play-based approach to learning in small, mixed-age groups is a strength of the home-based preschool, and many parents prefer it to a hectic classroom filled with 20 or 30 4-year-olds.
“Schools require 275 days a year for learning,” she says, “but I believe every minute is a learning opportunity. On a typical day, we’ll go to the pond and collect tadpoles to bring home so the children can learn about the life cycle. Two-year-olds might want to touch the little jelly-like eggs, while older children will watch as the eggs develop legs and tails and grow into frogs.”
This approach is also supported by the National Academies. A new vision for quality early childhood education curriculum. “Magic 8” kindergarten classroom practiceAccording to child development researchers, the program includes the exact same practices that FCCs routinely implement at home: close listening to children, comprehensive sequential activities, cooperative interactions between children, and minimizing time spent moving from one space to another or between lessons. These videos Home Grown showcases home-based childcare providers implementing these practices as they teach and care for children of different ages.
How can publicly funded preschool programs enroll more children and serve the needs of more families? NIEER’s latest report Ericsson Labs Recommendations Pay Equality and Provider Support Details of a strategy to establish preschool reimbursement rates that reflect the actual costs of providing quality preschool services in family child care centers. This includes supporting family child care centers with education, guidance, and evaluation programs specific to preschool standards, establishing environmental recommendations, and enforcing the infant-to-toddler ratios permitted by child care provider licenses appropriately for family child care centers. Such changes would allow Nelson and other family child care centers to maintain their programs and open their doors to 3- and 4-year-olds who are waiting for school to start. This solution would: Strengthening the existing capacity of FCC educatorsStrengthen states’ workforces and economies in both the short and long term.
In addition, the solution includes building a new kindergarten building in the old school building, New kindergarten teacher trainingWhat is needed, Patterson says, is “an innovative, inclusive view of home child care centers as centers of learning and of the qualified caregivers who run them as early childhood educators.” Kindergarten Teacher They deserve the same support and pay provided to school and center-based preschool programs.
