By GINNIE GRAHAM World Staff Writer
3/01/2007

The rankings gauge quality of standards and oversight.
View the report from the National Association of Child Care Resource and
Referral Agencies:
http://www.naccrra.org/

Oklahoma ranks sixth in the nation for its quality of child-care
centers, according to a report released Thursday by the National
Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.

The rankings come from a list of minimum standards used to gauge the
quality of standards and oversight of child-care centers. Oklahoma
ranked third for oversight and 22nd for standards.

"It's always good when Oklahoma is in the top 10," said Mark Lewis,
director of child-care services for the Oklahoma Department of Human
Services, which is the licensing and monitoring agency for more than
6,000 child-care centers and homes.

"Being sixth is good, but we should strive to be No. 1. We are a
national leader in what we are doing in child care, and that is
tremendous for our state to be able to say that."

In the standards categories where Oklahoma did not receive a full score,
the state comes close to some of the benchmarks used in the report,
Lewis said.

For example, Oklahoma requires 20 hours of annual training for
child-care teachers, but the report's benchmark is 24 hours. DHS makes
three announced monitoring visits to each child-care facility, but the
report requires four.

Oklahoma did not meet the recommendations of offering online inspection
and complaint reports, requiring center directors to have a minimum of a
bachelor's degree, and mandating that teachers have an associate's
degree or Child Development Associate credential.

"These are reasonable standards, but unfortunately, everything takes
money," said Gail Upton, executive director of the Oklahoma Child Care
Resource and Referral Network.

"We need to raise the expectations of center directors. To not even
require an associate's degree or Child Development Associate credential
is unacceptable. That is something we can work on."

The state fully met the recommendations for requiring a license for
operation, meeting the 10 basic standards for health and safety and
requiring parental involvement.

"This is something for us to be proud of in Oklahoma," Upton said.

Lewis credits the top marks to the star-ranking system that DHS started
in the 1990s to encourage providers to improve quality. The higher the
star ranking, the more reimbursement DHS provides for children receiving
a child-care subsidy.

The emphasis on early childhood education has elevated the concept of
child-care centers to development centers.

"We've improved tremendously in the last 10 years with the
implementation of Reaching for the Stars," Lewis said. "It brought
education of teachers and education of children to the forefront. We
always have had a focus on the health and safety of children, which is
still our first and foremost goal.

"But now, we are expanding into quality. We started focusing on
education and training of providers."