Building a Quality Rating System in Santa Barbara County

Providing our Children Access to Higher Quality Child Care   Espanol 

The early care and education community has been working to improve the quality of care and education for children for many years.  Santa Barbara County’s participation in the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grant brings additional resources to our community, $1.1 million over 4 years, but even more importantly it gives us the opportunity to launch a Quality Rating System that will recognize programs that meet quality standards that are known to make a difference for children.     

A QRIS Quality Rating and Improvement System) is designed to evaluate individual early learning programs on common standards such as the learning environment, teacher effectiveness, and parent engagement.  Programs receive a star rating similar to what you see when you look at hotel and restaurant reviews.  More stars reflect higher levels of quality.  For families, QRIS will give them a tool for making the best decisions for their child’s early learning and care.  For providers QRIS is a clear path to improve quality.      

First 5 Santa Barbara County is the lead organization for the Race to the Top grant and will be working in partnership with the early care and education community to develop a QRIS for the county.     

We are in the planning phase for this project.  We have included resources and ways to participate below.  Please check back frequently as we will continually update this page.   

Join Us!

Comments welcome now through May 2, 2012 on the Draft QRIS Model for Santa Barbara County. 

Here are some of the upcoming meetings:     

• April 17 – 1st  QRIS Community Meeting      
• Follow Up Conference Calls for participants - April 25; 6:00pm and May 1; 1:00pm      
• April 28 – QRIS Family Child Care Input Sessions – English 9:00 -10:30; Spanish 10:30 – 12:00     
• May 31 – 2nd QRIS Community Meeting 1:00 – 4:00 in Santa Ynez     
• Additional meetings will be set at the May 31 meeting     

To RSVP for any of these meetings, please contact Denise at 805 884-8085, or dcalderon@countyofsb.org     

Available Documents:
Santa Barbara’s local QRIS project.         
The Draft QRIS Model for Santa Barbara County/ QRIS Model by Tiers         
Resources and Information about QRIS systems
What is a Quality Rating and Improvement System 
QRIS for Santa Barbara County Survey / Espanol    

Contact us about QRIS:
To contact us about the Santa Barbara County QRIS project:   
Call us: 805.364.0190        Fax: 805.564.8586
Email us at: earlycare@countyofsb.org
Mail us at: First 5 Santa Barbara County - QRIS, 1306 Santa Barbara Street, Santa Barbara CA 93106