Arizona is one of 23 states recently awarded a federal grant designed to improve the early childhood system across the United States.
The Preschool Development Grant Birth Through Five Systems Building Grant, also known as PDG is a one-year grant worth $8.4 million and is administered through the Arizona Department of Education.
A portion of the money, about $500,000, will be used to allow about 5 dozen child care providers to enroll in First Things First’s (FTF) Quality First program as a Rating Only participant.
“That means that 60 programs that have not had the ability to participate in Quality First will now be able to get an assessment and a rating,” said FTF Senior Director of Early Learning Ginger Sandweg.
FTF’s Quality First program helps improve the quality of child care and preschool for children and families across the state. As Arizona’s Quality Improvement and Rating System, Quality First provides a unified, measurable standard of care and informs parents of how providers rate on those standards.
Enrolled Quality First participants receive an assessment and are given a rating from 1-5 stars. Those who are rated between 3- to 5-stars are considered to have met or exceeded quality standards. About 87% of participating providers have met or exceeded quality standards, with a majority having received a 4-star rating. Currently, more than 1,300 programs are enrolled through 2 different participation types in Quality First: Rating Only and Full Participation.
Both receive assessment and rating, and full participants receive varying levels of support based on their rating, so that programs with the lowest ratings receive the most support. Rating Only participants solely receive assessment and rating. Each rating is valid for 2 years before the program is assessed again. There is currently a waitlist of programs wanting to participate in Quality First.
With the additional Rating Only spaces made available through the grant, the goal is to hopefully allow more families access to quality child care programs. It costs about $8,000 to assess each program every 2 years.
Starting in July 2027, participants in Rating Only who achieve a rating of 3-star or above will be eligible for Quality First Scholarships, which were previously only available to those in Full Participation. These scholarships are given to eligible families who may not have been able to afford enrollment in a quality program.
The grant plans to target providers in communities with high needs through a variety of criteria, including high-poverty zip codes and programs that serve babies and toddlers and also those that serve children with special needs, Sandweg said.
“Having PDG support additional slots for Rating Only is helping us understand where quality exists and where supports are needed so that we can efficiently target our intensive services to child care programs,” she said. “Families will also have more access to quality-rated programs.”
A 2022 Preschool Development Grant to Arizona included money to expand the number of infant and toddler classrooms across the state and improvements to the early childhood education professional development portal. Arizona was also awarded previous Preschool Development Grants in 2015 and 2019, which focused on increasing early learning opportunities only for 4-year-old children.
