Chair Stevens Questions Support for Non-Awarded COMPASS Providers
Chair Althea Stevens asks how DYCD is supporting long-standing providers who were not awarded contracts under the competitive COMPASS RFP process.
Um, Chair Stevens?
I will jump right into it, and I know we are like kind of pressed with time, so I just ask that the answers be succinct uh because we want to make sure we get to as many people.
Um so I'll I'll stay with the compass theme and just kind of just thinking about um just the impact of like organizations, and and as we know, uh these decisions aren't being made easily for you guys, but just thinking about um because of the these this this RFP, we know that some of these organizations that didn't get contracts, this is actually going to be a huge impact on their agencies.
Um I'm wanted to know how is the agencies responding.
Um, how are you guys responding to the providers?
What supports have you been giving them?
What what has this what has this transition been looking like, especially for those we know that is going to have big impacts where they didn't get any awards?
So we're we're in the protest phase for the school base, but so I'm gonna speak more generally.
First, I want to say that the non-awardees, I want to acknowledge that they have financial and operational impacts that are gonna force them to make really difficult decisions, and we don't take that lightly.
Uh, and as I mentioned before, and this was a procurement process that followed all of the guidelines of procurement uh law, and yet uh we are gonna try to stand in the gap for these providers.
We're conducting briefings for them.
We've extended based on their feedback the protest uh uh period so that everybody can get a briefing before the date before they send a protest letter, but also we are trying to figure out um about having conversations about what this is gonna look like and if there are other things that we could do to support them, and then really leaning into the transition um periods and figuring out what does transition look like from summer to September.
How do we help transition providers in ways that hold their dignity intact while entering new providers and making the way for good providers to also stand in that gap and support children, youth, and families?
Thank you.