Austin Childcare Providers Network

102 Kindergarten Initiative - The C2K pilot promotes a collaboration funded by the Governor's Office of Early Childhood Development (GOECD) to develop a model that aligns training, curriculum, and assessments from childcare programs (with children ages 3-4), preschool programs and kindergarten classes. The C2K grant supports planning and implementation to: Develop partnerships that ensure that childcare providers, CPS State Pre-K and kindergarten teachers would be able to partner to accomplish the grant's goal of ensuring more Austin children successfully transition to kindergarten. Design strategies that promote shared training among State-PreK, kindergarten teachers and childcare owners and to collaborate on shared curriculum with a focus on child appropriate practices, training on the Illinois Kindergarten Individual Development Survey (KIDS), culturally responsive and trauma informed practices, the Pyramid model, assessments, and data collection. Create strategies to engage families of students enrolled in the pilot to strengthen school and home connections and ensure effective kindergarten transitions.

ExceleRate Pilot - The Illinois ExceleRate system incentivizes childcare programs to work on continuous quality improvement of programs, by directors and program staff increasing their higher education credentials/degrees and conducting program self-assessments. ACPN has initiated a pilot to work with a cohort of ten providers to increase their ExceleRate level from Bronze to Silver. The pilot will work on individualizing training and coaching of each provider to identify areas of improvement, to create an individual/program plan that works on the areas of improvement and provide training and coaching to support added program quality standards. The pilot will work with the cohort for a year.These three initiatives target the early childhood providers in our community to increase their knowledge and skills. These three initiatives address aspects of the early childhood workforce: The AECC project provides opportunities for individual childcare providers to complete their GED and/or begin their higher education journey to attain an Associate degree or Infant/Toddler credential. The ExceleRate Pilot works on improving the quality of the community's early childcare programs. The C2K pilot specifically targets preparing childcare providers to increase the ability of preschool children to be kindergarten ready and to successfully transition to kindergarten.