Phillips responds on networks and support for family child care
Phillips emphasizes the importance of family child care and networks as support systems. She says networks should not charge providers and they are working to ramp up support and flexibility.
Right.
So, you know, the first thing is the importance of family child care to the system and that we have to bring on our family child care providers along with us.
And I do just want to take a step back and, you know, share the importance of the networks as they were envisioned, as they were designed.
They are supposed to be a support system for family child care providers to provide a community support with working with children, you know, in mixed age, some of the administrative support pieces.
And, you know, we know that the networks have different services, different ways and consistency of how they're working with providers.
One thing I will say, they should not be charging providers for affiliating in order to participate in the early childhood program.
We are really pushing.
It does happen, though.
We are really pushing to ramp up our support for the family child care networks and opening up lines of communication
directly with the family child care providers who have a lot of feedback to help us understand what options will work, how can we look at our system, how do we
continue to really support this idea of networks as a benefit.
But we also do know that we need to...
See where there are areas for flexibility.
So we'll continue to talk with both the networks and providers as we are planning for the expansion.
Have you heard from any networks that you are all contracted with about a surge in interest from providers wanting to be a part of the network?
And what has their capacity been to start that process?
Yes, yes, we have.
And so they want to work with us to figure out, you know, what expansion will look like.
And we're having ongoing conversations with them about that.
I think this is a place where they're asking for additional support, additional guidance, and what type of, what expansion would look like and how they could bring in additional providers who have expressed interests.
So that's a place where we think that we can provide support as we're continuing to expand.