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About Sarah Vanover

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So far Sarah Vanover has created 9 blog entries.

Early Childhood Education Task Force 2022 Findings & Recommendations

Kentucky’s Early Childhood Education Task Force has been meeting diligently since June to obtain a greater understanding of Kentucky’s child care resources and how the state can better support that infrastructure to assist families and local businesses. On November 21st, the committee formally presented its findings and recommendations for the rest of Kentucky’s General Assembly.   Among its findings, the committee identified that Kentucky does not have enough child care available for all working families and [...]

By |2022-12-15T16:13:29-05:00December 15th, 2022|Blog, Economic Security, Education|
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Updates on CCAP to Benefit Families, Child Care Providers, and Local Economies

The regulations for the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) have been updated multiple times in the past two years in order to better support Kentucky’s working families and Kentucky’s child care providers. These updates have been possible due to one-time COVID-19 federal relief funds.   Several new programs have been implemented in the past couple of months that benefit working families and child care providers. Here’s an overview of the programs and how they are [...]

By |2022-11-09T14:02:05-05:00November 9th, 2022|Blog, Bloom Kentucky, Economic Security|
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A Look at the Mixed Delivery Preschool Model

The September meeting of the Early Childhood Education Task Force focused a large portion of its time gaining an understanding of the options for mixed-delivery preschool, which is a model defined as mixing two or more of the three major types of early childhood education: Private Child Care State-Funded Public Preschool Head start (for 3 to 5 year olds) or Early Head Start (for infants up to 3 years) This blending is an optional model [...]

By |2022-09-29T08:48:59-04:00September 29th, 2022|Blog, Economic Security, Education|
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Celebrating New Benefits for Child Care Employees

With the help of the American Rescue Plan funds, Kentucky will begin awarding child care subsidies for all employees that work in licensed and certified child care programs regardless of the role that they work, such as teachers, kitchen staff, etc. After a year of brainstorming how to best retain and attract child care employees and strengthen the child care infrastructure, Kentucky is establishing this categorical eligibility support for certified and licensed child care employees  [...]

By |2022-09-22T09:33:18-04:00September 22nd, 2022|Blog, Economic Security, Education|
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Reauthorizing the Child Care & Development Block Grant

Although the US Congress has now passed its Inflation Reduction Act, the bill did not include many of the family supports that were initially anticipated. The bill included affordable health care coverage; however, it left out essentials like affordable child care, extension of the child tax credit, and expanding paid family leave for new parents, kinship situations and foster youth.  The need for accessible, affordable child care is growing every day, and child care owners [...]

By |2022-08-29T16:35:38-04:00August 29th, 2022|Blog, Economic Security, Education|
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Early Childhood Education Task Force – A Focus on the Business Community

On Tuesday, July 26th, Kentucky’s Early Childhood Task Force met for the second time.  The focus of this meeting was to review the impact that child care has on Kentucky’s business community. Sandy Nott, the Vice President of Administration from Toyota’s Georgetown plant, and Twila Burdette, the Director of Rockcastle Hospital’s Child Development Center, both spoke about how having child care for their employees is an incentive to attract new talent to their businesses.  Ms. [...]

By |2022-08-04T14:23:07-04:00August 4th, 2022|Blog, Economic Security, Education|
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A Look at the New Early Childhood Education Task Force

The 2022 legislative session has ended, and now Kentucky’s lawmakers are dedicating their time to interim meetings in order to learn more about issues pressing the Commonwealth. This year a new committee has been added specifically to look at Kentucky’s early care and education systems – the Early Childhood Education Task Force is chaired by Senator Danny Carroll from Paducah and Representative Samara Heavrin from Leitchfield. They are joined by Senators Wil Schroder, Reginald Thomas, [...]

By |2022-07-06T16:14:24-04:00July 6th, 2022|Blog, Economic Security, Education, Race Equity|
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What can Kentucky learn from the Tennessee preschool program?

Dr. Dale Farran and her colleagues from Vanderbilt University recently completed a multi-year study on the effectiveness of Tennessee’s public school preschool program. The study followed children from preschool through middle school to see how preschool affected the children’s long-term learning. Tennessee does not offer universal pre-Kindergarten, but instead they focus their public school preschool program on children considered “at-risk” due to factors like living in poverty. Tennessee used full-day preschool that aligned with the [...]

By |2022-06-14T15:57:08-04:00June 14th, 2022|Blog, Education|
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Understanding the Child Care Staffing Crisis

The child care industry has suffered huge financial obstacles during the past two years. The Center for Disease Control asked child care programs to increase their health and safety requirements in a way that required additional staff to serve the same amount of children. COVID-19 outbreaks caused programs to shutdown classrooms, or even the entire program, for weeks at a time causing significant losses in revenue. Despite all these financial obstacles, they are still secondary [...]

By |2022-05-20T11:45:39-04:00May 20th, 2022|Blog, Economic Security, Education|
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