Early Learning Connections / Butler County Children's Center

Education program - 2024 was a very exciting year for education programs. The head start and Early head start programs were awarded a change in scope application that will be implemented in the 24-25 program year. This award allows a grantee to lower the amount of awarded slots and use these per slot monies to hire additional staff, change the program year calendars to make all classrooms in both counties duration and support staff and families going forward. This application will allow the head start classrooms to max out 15 children per classroom and still maintain the same amount of staff. This gives the children more personal experience and the staff to be hands-on with a smaller classroom. This award also gives all programs, including hssap, the ability to move to a 6.5 hour day instead of a 6 hour day. This then in turn will give the yearly calendar extra in-service days for staff to complete paperwork, participate in training, complete parent conferences and plan for lessons and units in their classroom. In addition, the budget allows for a second full-time mental health professional to be hired on staff to support classrooms, an additional program manager to lower the amount of classroom case loads and two floating assistant teachers in each County to help with staff shortages and keep classrooms open. The education department of elc also saw a lot of new hires and transfers within the agency as well. One key hire was a training manager. This position is new and works under the hr team. This position will help with onboarding new staff, completion and tracking of training for new employees and continuous monitoring throughout the year. Special services manager and pbis/kindergarten transition coordinator positions were also filled within the agency. It is elc's hopes to continue to recruit and hire new staff for the classrooms, support staff and administration going forward.lastly, 2024 brought some new locations to better serve our families throughout the year. Oakland will have a second head start classroom again for the 24-25 program year, the rowan classroom will now be located at the glade run campus in zelienople along with the former pre-k counts room at cve. Sugarcreek pre-k will move to east brady and freeport will also host a head start classroom. These moves have allowed elc to make new community Connections that will promote positive relationships and excellent programming for the families and children that we serve.

Child care - due to continued staffing issues, we had continue with reduced enrollment criteria to include up to 3rd grade only.

Elrc - elrc 3 received excellent results in meeting all performance requirements with no findings during the annual performance monitoring report for fiscal year 23-24.elrc's subsidized child care works (ccw) program had a total payout of over $19.4 million dollars to providers. We administered the continuous quality improvement grant (cqi) and awarded over $342,000 in grants to eligible child care providers. Elrc also distributed over $705,000 to our providers who manage the infant toddler contracted slots (itcs) programs in our region.elrc partnered with the professional development organization (pdo) to provide technical assistance to childcare staff looking to attain higher educational credentialing. In addition, elrc collaborated with the newly formed 2024 rapid response team (rrt) for region 3 to help eliminate/minimize child suspensions/expulsions from child care facilities.