DEL Vision: Children in Washington Start Kindergarten Healthy, Capable, and Confident

The Washington State Department of Early Learning 2017-2020 Strategic Plan

DEL vision: Children in Washington start kindergarten healthy, capable, and confident in their ability to learn and succeed.

DEL mission: DEL offers voluntary, comprehensive, high-quality early learning programs and support to families and early learning professionals.

The Department of Early Learning is responsible for offering programs and services that support healthy child development and school readiness for the approximately 90,000 children born in Washington each year. Our work includes helping ensure high-quality, safe and healthy learning environments, offering comprehensive preschool education to vulnerable children, providing family support and information, overseeing services for infants and toddlers with disabilities and developmental delays, and supporting early learning professionals.

DEL seeks advice from our Early Learning Advisory Council (ELAC), which includes early learning coalition representatives, parents, State agencies, child care providers, Legislators, tribal representatives and special education experts.

DEL’s approximately 271 employees work at the headquarter office in Olympia or in 16 field offices around the State.

Agency Goal

The Washington State Department of Early Learning (DEL) was created 10 years ago with an ambitious vision for the future that “children in Washington start Kindergarten healthy, capable, and confident in their ability to learn and succeed.” Today, this vision continues to guide our work.

Our programs and services support healthy child development and school readiness for approximately 90,000 children born in Washington each year. Our driving mission is to ensure all of our State’s children are ready for Kindergarten, regardless of race or family income.

Getting to 90 Percent: DEL’s Vision for School Readiness in Washington

In 2015 about 44 percent of all entering Kindergartners (and only about 34 percent from low-income households) met national Kindergarten readiness standards. In a world in which college degrees are obligatory to be part of the middle class, this statistic is unacceptable. Our vision for the Department of Early Learning is to lead the charge on improving outcomes for all children, eliminating race and class as predictors of progress and success for young learners. To that end, we have set a bold and ambitious goal: By 2020, 90 percent of five-year-olds will be ready for Kindergarten, with race and family income no longer predictors of readiness.

Why this goal?

With the implementation of universal, full-day Kindergarten in Washington after 2013, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) has rolled out an assessment of entering Kindergarteners, called WaKIDS. Measuring children on six domains of readiness[1], this observational assessment now gives us a clearer picture of where children are in their development from the earliest days of their K-12 career. What we’ve found is sobering. If a child’s family earns less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level, that child is more likely to be behind when they start school in Washington.

We have also found that a child’s race and ethnicity provide a strong predictor of how ready he or she will be on the first day of Kindergarten. Race is not an indicator of ability, so it should not be a predictor of readiness. Because race and income have such strong correlations in this country, we see that populations of low income children are often also children of color. As we implement strategies to reach our 90 percent goal, we must use a lens of racial equity if we are to succeed.

DEL has two categories of tools that we will use to change outcomes for children. First, we have some policy tools that will shape the interventions and preventions we have for children prior to entering Kindergarten. In order to deliver these interventions, our second set of tools involves running a more sophisticated enterprise within DEL.

Race / Kindergarten Ready (6/6) / Not Ready / Number
AI/AN / 35.2 / 64.8 / 764
Asian / 51.5 / 48.5 / 2,716
Black / 41.2 / 58.8 / 2,634
Hispanic / 31.1 / 68.9 / 15,552
Other / 49.4 / 50.6 / 4,975
PI / 33.9 / 66.1 / 641
White / 50.5 / 49.5 / 28,721

There are a number of dials that DEL can turn to change and shape outcomes for children. They range from the very targeted to ones that will impact most children in the system.

Running a More Sophisticated Enterprise at DEL

There are a lot of exciting opportunities for improvement in the Early Learning system. As we press forward towards our 90 percent Kindergarten readiness goal, we’ll work to modify how we do business and build critical infrastructure systems that support the entire agency.

IT Infrastructure

The most understandable WACs are still impeded by the paper-based licensing and attendance systems we currently have. We’ll replace this with a modern electronic system necessary to manage our business competently. In the short term, this will entail building a licensing platform and an electronic attendance system that increase efficiency in the licensing and monitoring processes, and give us adequate financial controls over our subsidy and other provider payment streams. We will integrate our attendance tracking with existing DSHS eligibility and payment systems. Our goal is to reduce inefficiencies that lead to incorrect payments and lost time and labor.

Interagency and Stakeholder Coordination

We are fortunate to have built so much capacity in Washington to advance early learning beyond DEL, including the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), the Department of Health(Health), the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) and Thrive Washington along with other nonprofit partners. However, we are not sufficiently leveraging each other’s work to ensure that services are seamless for families, roles are clear, data is shared, and resources are used wisely.

DEL relies on the expertise and networks of our public and private partners to coalesce behind the 90 percent goal. There are going to be many moving parts and critical pieces to put in place in order to reach this goal, and the input of stakeholders will ensure we stay on the right track. However, with many competing priorities and limited resources at hand, we will be unwavering in our commitment and movement towards this essential goal, and will structure our partner coordination accordingly.

Strategies:

• Ensure access to high-quality, safe and healthy learning environments.

Washington Licensed Child Care and Monitored Family, Friends and Neighbor (FFN) Care

DEL licenses approximately 6,000 child care centers and family home child care providers in Washington and has begun to monitor an additional 5,000 FFN providers. Licensed child care providers follow requirements set by the state to ensure children in licensed care are in safe, healthy, and nurturing places.

Priority objectives:

• Bolster unlicensed child care enforcement and grow base of high-quality early learning providers State-wide.
• Increase capacity to better monitor Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) providers.
• Increased compensation and educational requirement for child care providers.

• Racial Equity & Professional Development

Washington’s early learning professionals are a diverse group of dedicated people and DEL celebrates this. They are from and responsive to the communities in which they work, and this is a key part of providing culturally relevant services to children. DEL is expanding its support and opportunities for these professionals, while ensuring quality, through its Early Achievers program (Washington’s Quality Rating and Improvement System). This will give providers the tools they need to deliver the high quality early learning programs we know produce improved outcome for children.

While we press for more providers to participate in this professional pathway, as an agency we need to focus on its areas that are tied to child outcomes and reduce the overall number of standards. This will enable Early Achievers to become more focused, effective, and user friendly.

Part of having high-quality preschool programs is having excellent materials in the classroom, including ones that represent diversity and dual language instruction. DEL recognizes that this can be a financial burden to providers who are often low-income themselves and are running small businesses. We need to provide more high-quality instructional materials at little or no-cost to providers serving populations of children with the greatest needs.

Another key component of supporting and expanding our early learning workforce is with increased pay. We have begun this work by instituting a tiered reimbursement system for Early Achievers participants, but we need to go further. Our strategy will be to develop a reimbursement strategy that pays more for more qualified and experienced staff. To phase this in and develop the appropriate models, we’ll begin implementing this(within the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program - ECEAP). Ultimately, we believe that the entire preschool system needs to have pay rates that are comparable to the K-12 system.

• Alignment

While getting kids ready for Kindergarten is a top priority for DEL, our first job is always to reduce the potential for harm to children and increase the ability of licensees to provide high-quality care and instruction. To that end, we will make a renewed commitment to compliance, with State statutory and Federal regulatory requirements for frequency and follow-up within child care. We have an excellent track-record for safety in our State’s licensed care system and we intend to build on that success.

In order for regulation to work, providers and licensors have to understand and be able to comply with it. Current rules are complicated, extensive, and at times an outdated collection of regulations. We are in the process of completing a project to align the Working Connections Child Care (WCCC subsidy program), Early Achievers, and ECEAP standards to provide clarity and consistency. By relying on the accepted science of how regulations can best ensure child safety, we’ll embark on a process of weighting our WACs, distributing clear information to parents, and implementing consistent corrective behavior for providers.

• Subsidized Child Care

The largest group of kids supported by DEL is authorized within the Working Connections Child Care(WCCC) subsidy program. Seasonal and Homeless child care subsidy programs also help ensure low-income children are in safe places while their parents work or look for work.

Priority objectives:

• Serve all children who receive subsidized care in an Early Achievers-rated Level 3 facility.
• Build an effective time and attendance system to ensure that providers are accurately paid for the services they provide.
• Streamline the Working Connections Child Care subsidy and Seasonal and Homeless child care programs.
• Expand WCCC subsidy program to serve families in danger of being waitlisted.

Working Connections Child Care program enrollment budget capacity has a budgeted limit of 33,000 families. WCCC has experienced a wait list in recent years (once in the past 10 years a wait list was implemented for a few months in 2011). Current estimates predict that the program will reach the 33,000 family budget capacityin October of 2016. The forecast for this prediction is revisited often and may be subject to change.

Priority status (listed in no particular order) will be granted to those participating in the Early Head Start-Childcare Partnership, teen parents, homeless families as defined by the McKinney-Vento Act, families receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and families with special needs children.

• Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDF) Authorization

The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) is a Federal funding source that supports low-income working families by providing access to affordable, high-quality early care and after-school programs. CCDF also improves the quality of care to support children’s healthy development and learning by supporting child care licensing, quality improvement systems to help programs meet higher standards, and support for child care workers to attain more training and education.

Priority objectives:

• Bring base child care center subsidy rates in to compliance with Federal law (which will ensure access for low-income families).
• Clearly communicate new standards and monitoring practices to the diverse groups of providers throughout the State.

The reauthorization of the CCDF program has allowed essential programs in early learning to thrive including but not limited to licensed child care, Washington’s quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) - Early Achievers and homeless child care.

The Child Care and Development Fund Block Grant (CCDF) Act of 2014 reauthorizes the child care program for the first time since 1996 and represents a historic re-envisioning of the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) program.

• Offer comprehensive preschool education and early learning to vulnerable children.

Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP)

We fund preschool for 3-year-old and 4-year-old children from low-income families, who are involved in child welfare services or who qualify for special education. The Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) offers classroom learning, as well as family support, and health and nutrition resources.

ECEAP is our most measurably effective tool for getting low-income kids ready for Kindergarten. But we still have work to do. Results show that time spent in the classroom (“dosage”) matters for how well kids improve and which families are able to access the program.

ECEAP has showed promising results for the low-income children who participate in it. Across all six WaKIDSdomains (social-emotional, physical, cognitive, language, literacy, and mathematics),enrolled children experience significant gains in readiness. However, early results for the program show that we have some hurdles to overcome in order for this program to meaningfully boost readiness in children from the lowest income households. Comparison of results for Kindergarteners who entered Kindergarten in fall of 2015 show that dosage is an indicator of a child’s success in the program. Children who participate in two years of the program do better than their peers who participate in only a single year. Furthermore, many children may benefit from summer programs to prevent a drop-off in readiness during the months before Kindergarten.

Priority objectives:

• Increase number of full school day and extended day slots to make ECEAP more accessible for single and working parents.
• Build high-quality early learning facilities to address a state-wide shortage of ECEAP facilities.
• Provide ECEAP services through the summer to avoid the summer “drop-off.”

Access and reach is also a concern for ECEAP success. Because most ECEAP classes are not offered for a full school or extendedday, families who need the services most (working single mothers, parents working two jobs) have logistical problems with getting their children from one program to another in the middle of the day. Expanding classes to full day will help solve this problem, and provide critical additional instruction time for children.

If we can effectively expand ECEAP to the scale that meets the state’s needs we can get closer to our target of 90 percent readiness.

In order to do this, we’ll need to scale up our system to add almost 7,400 new slots by 2020. This means an estimated 400 new classrooms and 232 new centers will need to be available and willing to provide services for these slots, with an emphasis on high-need communities. We’ll have to compete for facility space with school districts facing class size reduction requirements, and we’ll have to invest in developing our workforce to have enough teachers in these new ECEAP classrooms.

• Math

Around 50 percent of children are ready for Kindergarten in all domains except math. This is a huge target for improvement, and our strategy to address this issue will take a variety of approaches. First, we need to improve ECEAP curriculum. While children experience significant gains in most domains after participating in ECEAP, we are still seeing only slightly more than 50 percent ready in math at the start of their Kindergarten year. Improving the curriculum and training for all ECEAP facilities will help improve readiness for children.

Because math is an area that children across a wide breath of demographics are struggling with, DEL needs to undertake a broad-based approach to raise awareness in parents of this issue. We’ll undertake a public outreach campaign, using local celebrities and positive messages to help parents understand the importance of early numeracy instruction. Many parents did not have positive experiences with math when they were in school – we want to help them have fun and be effective in teaching their children early math skills.