Sharing Resources...a continuation

For the past few weeks I have been exploring The Children's Defense Fund and I finally received a newsletter! Yay!!!  This week I took a closer look at the website and then the newsletter which offered a vast variety of interesting topics that were important to educators, parents and anyone that is has an interest in Early Childhood Education.




The topics included the following:

• New Data on Early Childhood Education and Care
• 50 States. Every Child. Every School.
• Increasing Access to Full-Day Kindergarten
• A Strong Start
• Early Childhood in the President’s FY13 Budget

The section titled Early Childhood in the President's FY13 Budget was a great piece of information. The following is the information from the Children's Defense Fund website which covers the topic of accessibility & affordability:

President Obama’s FY2013 Budget proposes promising investments in early care and education, including increased funding for all of the major federal funding streams for early learning. The president’s proposal also offers a 5 percent increase to programs that serve infants and toddlers with special needs, and commits a portion of new Race to the Top dollars to a third round of Early Learning Challenge Grants. If approved by Congress, the proposals outlined below would go a long way toward improving quality and increasing eligibility for services for young children and families across the country. Specifically, the President’s FY2013 budget proposal would:

• Increase Head Start funding by $85 million over FY 2012 funding levels. This would maintain the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (“ARRA”) expansion, allowing 962,000 children to participate in Head Start. These funds would also support the implementation of new regulations to strengthen the program by requiring low-performing grantees to compete for continued funding.
• Provide an $825 million dollar increase in the Child Care and Development Block Grant which offers subsidized child care dollars to families who need it. These funds would include a $300 million investment for a new child care quality initiative that states would use to improve the services that children receive in child care settings by investing directly in programs and teachers. This increase would also ensure that more than 70,000 additional low-income children would be eligible to receive services.
• Support programs that benefit families with infants and toddlers by providing a $20 million increase to Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the section that provides grants for infants and toddlers with special needs.
• Provide a $50 million increase to evidence-based early childhood home visiting programs to improve health and developmental outcomes for families in at-risk communities.
• Provide a third round of Early Learning Challenge Grants to help states improve their early care and education systems through a portion of the $850 million investment in Race to the Top funding.
• Flat fund other important programs in early childhood including Part B, Section 619 of IDEA (pre-school special education) and Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program.