Great News!
This past month has been encompassed with a large hill to climb.
As I mentioned before many centers across the state of Illinois were at risk of
closing due to the state budget shortfalls. Centers across the state have gone without
being paid for services rendered in the month of April. This also took place on
last summer which took place for two months. Centers are care providers are
still trying to recover from last year. We have almost reached the top. On May 21,
2012 I received a letter from Child Care Resource and Referral that Senate Bill
(formerly HB164) has passed both the House and the Senate and has been signed
by Governor Quinn. This will allow providers to receive funding for families
that they provider care for participating in the Child Care Assistance Program
through the end of Fiscal year 2012. Please continue to keep those center across the states in
your thoughts as many are still faced with losing
funding as funding for child care
and early education is potentially going to be
cut for the FY2013.
I just wanted to share this with you all. It is a true sign
that our advocating and supporting our future leaders of America is valuable. Let‘s
keep fighting together to save the educations of our children.
Now back to work. For
over the past year the NACCRRA has been posting articles about the budget crisis across the country. There is a section under Program and
Services that discusses early childhood focus. This section provides data and
news articles about trends in child care across the country. Looking at
some of the articles I realize that we as a country are in big
trouble if we don’t
solve our budget
issues. Another thought I had was I can see how hard it can be
for our govemnent leaders knowing that
funding has to be appropriated to
support the entire country especially
with the unemployment rating being
so high. This means that additional funding must be made available in these
areas as well. There is just not enough funding to support it all. We just have to keep pushing for more from our politicians.
I also wanted to
share this with those who are
looking for additional trainings in
child care.
Trainings are available for professionals to professionals 24
hours a day 365 days a year so there is no need to wait. Trainings are designed
to assist professional’s complete annual requirements, CDA certifications, CDA
renewal or in-service training.
There are several topics available. If interested go to the
NCRAA home page, from here select
Program and Services, select ChildCare Aware Training. At the bottom of
the page select the http://naccrra.smarthorizons.org/
. Then select Child
Care provider, this will take you to a list of trainings. Make sure to input your local zip code to access
the training curriculum. I’ve tried other ways to navigate to get here but they
did not work.
There are series of
trainings, Center Based, Family Child Care,
General Training, Webinars &Blended Learning, Business Education and
Spanish Courses, so many to choose from. I found many of great interest. One that is available is operating standards for
High Quality Inclusive Child Care. It consists of operating standards for high
quality inclusive child care that will strengthen directors’ ability to reach and
include children with disabilities.
Stephanie, so pleased you didn't give up and in the end are getting some good news! It is such a shame that more and more students are in need of services, but the budgets are being cut! I will be praying that 2013 is less challenging than the past 2 years have been. Your faithfulness has not gone unnoticed!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing the info about the trainings. Who knew that was even available?! Great blog!