Congratulations to Kizzie Harris! She is the first family child care provider in Oak Park to receive a Bronze Level rating from the ExceleRate Illinois Quality Rating System. ExceleRate provides guidelines and standards for early childhood professionals to improve their quality and it gives parents a way to know staff are well trained and top notch. It’s no easy feat and we applaud Kizzie’s hard work!
ExceleRate Illinois is a statewide quality rating and improvement system designed to make continuous quality improvement an everyday priority among early learning providers. The program establishes standards for helping infants, toddlers and preschool-age children develop intellectually, physically, socially and emotionally. It provides a framework for early learning professionals like Kizzie to identify opportunities for improvement, increase their skills and take steps to make positive changes. Early learning programs are awarded quality ratings of green, bronze, silver and gold to provide parents with an objective way to make quality a part of their decision making when selecting a program for their children. The ratings are broadly publicized and the ExceleRate website provides a searchable database to check ratings of child care providers .
The Collaboration provides training, coaching and technical assistance to early childhood programs in Oak Park and River Forest to support their engagement in ExceleRate. We foster a professional learning community of child care providers and help parents know the skill level of their children’s caregivers.
More local family child care providers are currently on track to improve their ExceleRate ratings as well as to receive the new Family Child Care Credential from Gateways to Opportunity. With the Collaboration’s continued support, Oak Park and River Forest families will benefit from continued improvement in the quality of services available to our youngest children.
You can find Kizzie’s family child care site, Little Sprouts, and other family child care providers near you in our Resource Directory.
The Collaboration celebrates Kizzie’s accomplishment!