Community Pre-K, (CPK), is a “play and learn” experience designed for children three and four years of age in the care of license-exempt providers. A small team under the License Exempt Assistance Project (L.E.A.P.) provides structured, center-like pre-school “play & learn” activities for children and their providers. Play & Learn models of professional development for Family Friend and Neighbor child care providers are a new strategy emerging in several communities around the country that show increasing promise in regards to enhancing quality of care and children’s school readiness (Organizational Research Services, 2006; Porter & Vuong, 2008; Porter, Paulsell, Del Grosso, Avellar, Hass, & Vuong, 2009).
There is a great need for more research and evaluation on family, friend and neighbor care (license-exempt care). Despite the importance of quality child care experiences for children's present and future well being, relatively little research has explored practices that “work” with this group of caregivers. This is mostly due to the many challenges involved with conducting research and evaluations on family, friend and neighbor child care projects. Some of the challenges include 3 sample variability, inadequate theoretical frameworks, recruitment issues, methodology concerns, and a limited ability to generalize results. Nevertheless, it is imperative that we gain a deeper understanding of the link between license-exempt child care quality and children’s developmental outcomes. While we have decades of research that has indicated which aspects of formal child care are predictive of children’s future and concurrent social and emotional outcomes, we have yet to discover components of family, friend and neighbor care that are distinct from more formal care as well as predictive of children’s current and future success.
Our aim in conducting the evaluation on Community Pre-K (CPK) is not only to improve future delivery of the program, but to also add to the literature base on FFN child care initiatives that aim to support quality in license-exempt child care. The research literature will offer useful insights for developing future initiatives to support these caregivers. Findings from research provide information about the characteristics of the initiatives, their implementation, and the outcomes for participants. Data on characteristics of the initiatives can help us understand the range of service delivery strategies that have been used to date; content, service delivery strategies, and intensity of these programs; and the fit between these features and caregivers’ interest in supports.
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