Friday, 14 January 2005 - 10:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Evaluating a Large-Scale Community Initiative on Early Childhood

Building family child care capacity and quality: One urban county's solution

Purpose: Cuyahoga County’s Early Childhood Initiative (ECI) includes an effort to expand and improve the provision of family-based child care as a strategy for meeting the child care needs of County families, particularly those entering and remaining in the workforce as a result of 1996 welfare reform legislation. The study of the ECI family child care component evaluates the objectives of increasing the number of child care homes and enhancing the quality of care in those homes.

Methods: In our evaluation, several sources of data were used. Starting Point, the local resource and referral agency, provided administrative data containing information about all providers trained and certified during the first three years of the Initiative. Using these data, we assessed capacity-building efforts including the number of homes certified and the training and technical support activities that occurred during the first three years of the Initiative. As a means of evaluating the quality of child care available to families and the changes in quality as a result of technical assistance, trained observers visited a random sample of 95 family child care homes. Two standard assessment measures were used to obtain baseline and 12-month follow-up assessments of quality.

Results: Starting Point and the Regional System were successful in recruiting and maintaining a large number of family child care homes, surpassing their initial certification goals. The System was less successful in assuring technical assistance visits as originally planned and in focusing those visits on promoting quality caregiving among providers.

Implications: While capacity-building efforts were successful, the quality enhancement efforts were not. We discuss the difficulties of going to scale, the effects of child care requirements on child care quality, the importance of training, and the difficulty of changing adult behavior.

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