Travis County Commissioners Court
April 26, 2005
Item 13
13. Approve modification no. 5 to interlocal agreement no. Il010211ef with Austin community college to provide early childhood mentoring services. I send you an e-mail yesterday with -- with two or three questions that I had. And you may have answered those. I didn't get a chance to open my e-mails this --
>> yes, I did.
>> -- this morning.
>> good morning, judge, Commissioners, sherri flemming executive manager for health and human services. I believe the judge's questions related to our reasoning behind transferring dollars from our child care fund that we put with work source to leverage federal dollars into the a.c.c. Contract, which is for child care quality, and just a couple of points there. The first is we have a better formula this year for our federal match, so we are actually leveraging more federal money with less local dollars than we've had previously. In addition, the child care quality piece is a piece that our partners increasingly have been unable to continue their investment. Because of mandates that they have to -- to meet from the state and federal government. So we are in -- in attempting to prevent that gap from widening in the child care quality piece because it is -- it is common that children spend a lot of time in daycare and if they are spending a lot of time in daycare, we want them to receive the highest quality of services while they are in those programs. In addition, child care quality training allows the providers to -- toeceive a higher reimbursement through the child care system as they take referrals through the work source, through work source's various programs. So we feel like we are not -- not negatively impacting the amount of child care dollars available. In fact we still have more dollars available to -- for subsidized child care in addition to being able to provide this additional child care quality training.
>> when we say quality child care, we mean what now?
>> well, we mean staff that are trained in early childhood development, who have the skills to not only provide organized play for children, but also educational components that we see are critical for kids to move into the school system. They begin to learn their alpha bets, they begin to learn their numbers, colors and those things that we normally think about happening in kindergarten. Oftentimes kids are receiving those -- those types of construction in the daycare setting, so the -- so the better trained our staff are to provide those services, the better kids are prepared to move into the school system.
>> so hopefully that will get us a little bit more away from -- from babysiting, more in the early child education, child development.
>> absolutely.
>> and the last stat I saw had us at 12% of child care providers certified as quality child care.
>> absolutely, we would want to raise that number as much as we can.
>> then there was also a positive report about children in daycare centers that they build up their immunity to diseases in the long run. So that's a good report.
>> absolutely. Absolutely.
>> [laughter]
>> visit family connections -- when folks are calling into family connections and trying to get information about child care, they are not saying low bid give me the cheapest thing that you can find. In fact they are a little distressed to find out there are not more that have the higher level. They are just not there. So the quality is equally as important as the quantity. But they are not asking for low bid here give me the cheapest thing that you can find for my family, they are not saying that.
>> I thought that I had a feel for the answer, but I thought the public should know. When the read the backup.
>> move approval.
>> absolutely.
>> we continue to monitor the reimbursement -- the draw down rate from the federal government, we continue to monitor the use of the quality child care dollars, so we are continually ensuring that those dollars are spent in the optimum way in the community each year.
>> okay. That was a motion and a second. Any more discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote.
>> thank you very much.
>> you're welcome.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, April 27, 2005 7:40 AM