Parents will have new tool for rating child care centers

NORFOLK

Parents with children in more than three dozen South Hampton Roads child care facilities will soon be able to look on a Web site to see how many stars their provider has earned.

A grant from The Norfolk Foundation will allow 28 child care centers and 10 home-based facilities in South Hampton Roads to be among the first in the state to receive a published grade, which advocates say could eventually improve the services provided to young children in facilities throughout Virginia.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced the grant via teleconference Wednesday.

The money will allow state-trained consultants to rate the facilities, pay for mentors to help them improve and fund educational and training scholarships for their teachers. Advocates hope the voluntary system will one day be used to grade facilities throughout the state.

More than 2,200 children are enrolled in the participating South Hampton Roads child care centers, and up to another 120 could be enrolled in the home care facilities. The ratings for the child care centers will be posted on the state-level Smart Beginnings Web site by the end of the year but grades for the home-based providers won’t be published until 2010 at the earliest, said Kathy Glazer, director of the Virginia Office of Early Childhood Development.

“While the business communities in a number of regions in Virginia are embracing the power of early childhood education initiatives, the South Hampton Roads business community has been the leader,” Kaine said via teleconference.

The funding comes just months after a study coordinated by Smart Beginnings South Hampton Roads revealed problems with local child care facilities, including low wages for workers, scarce availability and relatively high costs. Nearly half weren’t licensed by the state.

Virginia’s current licensing program regulates minimum health and safety standards. Licensed programs also must adhere to state administrative policies and employee qualifications and are subject to unannounced inspections, the results of which the Virginia Department of Social Services publishes on its Web site.

The new rating system will provide a new level of scrutiny. It will assign up to five stars to a child care center based on four areas: staff training and qualifications, interactions between children and staff members, class size and staff-to-child ratios, and learning environment and instructional practices .

“For parents, it really is the consumer reports of child care,” said Lisa Howard, executive director of the local Smart Beginnings.

Sixteen states, including North Carolina, already use such a grade system. More than 24 other states are planning or piloting similar programs, said Abby Thorman, a Florida-based education consultant.

Advocates have been pushing Virginia to implement the rating system for more than a year. But state lawmakers denied funding for the system this year.

However, 175 classrooms in 13 Virginia communities, including South Hampton Roads, tested the rating system over the past year using local money and grants, Glazer said. This year, 350 classrooms in 13 communities, including the 28 child care centers in South Hampton Roads, will be assessed.

The Norfolk Foundation will also pay a researcher to evaluate how changes prompted by the program affect children. The foundation hopes to use the information to convince state officials to fund the grading system, said Angelica Light, the foundation’s president.

“We said, 'Let’s get it going. Let’s be a model for the state’,” she said.

Tony Zontini, director of the Judeo-Christian Outreach Oceanfront Preschool, said his school’s participation in the pilot program last year helped him learn ways his staff can earn continuing education credits.

“They’re not here to grade us, per se,” he said. “They’re here to help us.”

Besides $1 million for the local rating system program, the foundation also announced another $3.7 million in grants. Most of the money comes from the foundation’s Batten Educational Achievement Fund.

Each of the area’s five cities can receive $500,000 over five years as a matching grant for an initiative that would help young children and their families. The money also would pay for an early childhood education public awareness campaign and the development of a regional system to link families of newborns to needed services.

Norfolk leaders also announced Wednesday that they plan to establish a commission on children and families.

“High-quality child care is an important investment in the quality of our future work force,” Norfolk City Councilman Barclay C. Winn said.

 Amy Jeter, (757) 446-2730, amy.jeter@pilotonline.com