The Impact

The Collaboration for Early Childhood believes that measuring our progress to support very young children and their families is critical to our success. We are making a difference. Here are some of our key accomplishments over the past year.

  • Increased professional development activities at 12 child care centers and preschool sites.  Program offerings include a 12 workshop series for each of two years (2010-2011 and 2011-2012) focused on developmentally appropriate practice.
  • Supported the creation of professional development plans at 12 sites, and provided professional development advising. As a result, 27 early learning providers enrolled in college level courses earning a total of 192 credit hours. This represents an increase of 22% in the number of staff in targeted centers raising their educational qualifications in early childhood.
  • The Collaboration also provided mentoring and technical guidance to five full-day, full year child care centers to support their participation in the Illinois Quality Rating System to achieve a star level score to raise their child care reimbursement rates from the state.  Three centers achieved a two star rating.  One center made substantial improvements and narrowly missed a 1 star rating and 1 center submitted its application and is awaiting a rating.
  • The Collaboration provided up to four hours of training and follow-up technical assistance to directors at eight centers on parent engagement and communication.
  • The Collaboration helped 83 staff members create individual professional development plans and 12 center directors create center professional development plans based on the individual staff plans - a first for all.
  • The Collaboration revised the Early Childhood Resource Directory and printed 15,000 copies of the 2010 edition for distribution throughout Oak Park, River Forest and Forest Park.

Database Development

Through a two-year funding commitment from Oak Park Township beginning in January 2010, the Collaboration is implementing critical first steps toward establishing a comprehensive information system about our community's very youngest children and the impact of our efforts. This initial funding supports the development of an Information System to help the publicly funded preschool programs monitor the progress of the children in their programs and assess the long-term effects of the programs on children's learning throughout their elementary and secondary education. It is comprised of three components:

  • A Child Population component that includes data on the number and location of Oak Park's at-risk, preschool-aged children;
  • A Recruitment and Referral component that will track data to provide information about which recruitment and retention strategies are most effective amongst hardest to reach families; and
  • An Assessment component to track the impact of the programs.

A committee comprised of people with expertise in database development, management and system interaction guides this effort and provides significant pro bono services. The Collaboration secured pro bono legal services from Proskauer Rose LLP, through the Community Economic Development Law Project to develop an information-sharing agreement and authorization forms to support data collection and sharing between the Collaboration and the four publicly funded preschool programs.

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