Providers

A recent research brief from the Prenatal to 3 Policy Impact Center examines state initiatives to improve compensation for early educators. Policies are discussed in five areas: wage supplements, bonuses and stipends, tax credits, benefit supports, and subsidized child care. It shares examples of programs from several states in each category, including Minnesota’s Great Start…

Our Empower to Educate advisors throughout the state help hundreds of current and aspiring early childhood educators begin, advance, and sustain their child care careers. Thanks to a new video, you can hear in their own words how they use their passion for the field to support program participants. This inspiring video reminds all of…

Learn more about mentoring in a child care setting from new videos about two of our programs: the Empower to Educate mentoring program, and the T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood apprenticeship program. We appreciate the mentors and mentees who agreed to go on camera and talk about their positive experiences with mentoring! The videos are available to…

Recently, the online publication EdSurge ran an article on “What’s Behind the Explosion of Apprenticeships in Early Childhood Education?” Erin Young, the Director of T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Minnesota, is featured in the article, talking about the mentorship component of Minnesota’s new registered apprenticeship program, which began last year. In the article, Young explains that each…

Workforce retention is a constant challenge in child care programs. Fortunately, Minnesota has a program to help these programs retain and support staff. The Retaining Early Educators Through Attaining Incentives Now (REETAIN) program provides competitive bonuses of $500 – $3,000 to incentivize well-trained child care professionals to stay in the workforce, creating more consistent care…

Child Care Aware of Minnesota strives to offer quality service to everyone we touch. In the past year, we measured the following satisfaction levels with our programs: Professional Development Parent Aware Financial Supports REETAIN Bonuses:  T.E.A.C.H. Scholarships: Empower to Educate We hope to maintain and even improve these outcomes going forward. For more information about…

Minnesota has our fair share of emergencies, including tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, blizzards, floods, house fires, and gas leaks, which require child care homes and centers to be prepared so children are safe. Here are five ways that child care providers can plan for emergencies: A new training course, Emergency Preparedness for Child Care Programs, is…

Workforce retention is a constant challenge in child care programs. Fortunately, Minnesota has a program to help these programs retain and support staff. The Retaining Early Educators Through Attaining Incentives Now (REETAIN) program provides competitive bonuses of $500 – $3,000 to incentivize well-trained child care professionals to stay in the workforce, creating more consistent care…

Child Care Aware of Minnesota staff throughout the state work hard to meet the needs of the field through numerous programs, including training, grants and scholarships, help entering the early childhood field, and Parent Aware Ratings. We measure how satisfied our constituents are through surveys of program participants, and the results for the past year…

People in the early childhood field know that the amount that most child care programs can charge families for tuition is usually less than the actual cost of operating the programs, much less running a profitable business. A new report demonstrates this is true across almost all geographies and program types in Minnesota. In fall…

Workforce retention is a constant challenge in child care programs. Fortunately, Minnesota has a program to help these programs retain and support staff. The Retaining Early Educators Through Attaining Incentives Now (REETAIN) program provides competitive bonuses of $500 – $3,000 to incentivize well-trained child care professionals to stay in the workforce, creating more consistent care…

Parent Aware Rated programs have a lot to say about their Parent Aware experience! This summer, we were able to interview three of them: Renee, who operates a family child care program in central Minnesota, Lili, who operates a family child care program in northwest Minnesota, and Leah, who is the director of a child…

As we begin the 20th anniversary year of the T.E.A.C.H. Minnesota scholarship program, our Communications Director, Diane Benjamin, took time to interview our Director of Financial Supports, Val Peterson, who was there at the beginning of T.E.A.C.H. The T.E.A.C.H. program began in Minnesota in 2002, with support from 14 different funders. These included statewide and…

As we begin the 20th anniversary year of the T.E.A.C.H. Minnesota scholarship program, our Communications Director, Diane Benjamin, took time to interview our T.E.A.C.H. Scholarship staff, Erin Young and Nghia Vang. We began our conversation with Erin and Nghia sharing that the most satisfying part of their work is helping early educators complete their degree…

Child Care Aware of Minnesota is excited to align our work with the national Power to the Profession (P2P) initiative, hosted by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. The early childhood education profession is working toward having unified standards and guidelines for our field. We know that high-quality early care and education…

A recent news story on National Public Radio highlights the continued need to promote a play-based approach to learning. A randomized, longitudinal study of over 2,900 low-income children in Tennessee found that those who attended a free, public pre-kindergarten program initially scored higher than their peers on school readiness, but by third grade, were doing…

In Part 1 of this blog post, we reviewed the early days of Eager-to-Learn. In this post, we look to the program’s future. Eager-to-Learn (ETL) began 20 years ago as a pioneering online learning program for early educators and continues to innovate and grow. One program priority is to keep addressing equity and accessibility through…

This year, Eager-to-Learn (ETL), our early education online learning platform, celebrates its 20th anniversary. An institution in Minnesota’s training environment today, ETL started when online learning was just emerging. As Cory Woosley, Director of Workforce Development, remembers, “Online learning was not a big thing twenty years ago. We worked with national partners to learn about…

T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood® MINNESOTA is a scholarship program that helps early childhood and school-age care providers increase their levels of education, compensation, and commitment to the field by earning college credits and degrees. T.E.A.C.H. program recipient Lynn Barten recently shared the following story with us: “I had the goal of obtaining my early childhood education degree…

Parent Aware, Minnesota’s Quality Rating and Improvement System, has a mission to help families find the quality care and education their children need to succeed in school and life. The five Parent Aware Recruiters are a crucial part of building the program throughout the state. Amber English is the recruiter for southeast Minnesota, based at…