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SAFE & INSPIRING ENVIRONMENTS

Mission

Imperative #4 Guarentee safe and inspiring learning environments for our children

Summary:  Safe and inspiring learning environments lay the foundation for high quality early childhood experiences. The physical location and environment of early childhood programs has a tremendous influence on children, families, and providers. The quality and design of these environments can not only ensure safety and comfort, but also actively promote development, learning, and positive social interactions. Locating programs near where parents live or work is fundamental to their ability to access child care, allowing them to work and support their families. Unfortunately, many Detroit families lack a safe, inspiring place to send their children for early childhood care.

Detroit's Context

Detroit's Early Childhood Education facilities lack both adequate supply of available ECE seats and a properly defined set of criteria to define a high quality learning environment. First, there are simply not enough high quality childcare providers to meet the needs of Detroit youth (9). There are over 55,000 children below the age of 5 in Detroit, and a gap of over 23,000 seats needed to fill the demand for childcare among this group. (31) Beyond this dearth of quality opportunities, the city offers no set of shared criteria on which to evaluate the quality of ECE facilities (9). The initial Hope Starts Here Community Survey indicate that this is an important area for imporvement as “safe, healthy, and clean,” childcare was the top priority of respondents (9). Addressing these challenges will require significant investment. First policymakers and local authorities should work to establish standardized definitions and criteria for Facilities that allow ECE programs to have an optimal impact. Additionally, we must invest in our ECE providers to ensure that meeting these standards is a possible given their already daunting financial constraints.

Policy Alignment

The work of IFF and the Great Start Office align well this imperative and priority 4.1 of the HSH framework. Advocates should continue building off the work of these partners to both evaluate the quality of facilities and help to invest in better facilities with larger capacity.

Measures

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