March 24, 2010

Wisconsin Department of Children & Families' YoungStar, Wisconsin's Quality Rating and Improvement System Proposal

The Wisconsin Department of Children & Families has proposed YoungStar, a quality improvement program intended to help child care provider organizations improve the quality of child care statewide and to prevent fraud. The program provides a tool for parents to identify and select quality child care, creates incentives for child care programs to improve services to low-income children, links quality to Wisconsin Shares payments, and provides a mechanism to further prevent fraud in the Wisconsin Shares program. Wisconsin has nearly 8,500 regulated child care providers with a statewide capacity to serve more than 234,000 children each year, allowing their parents to work. Sixty thousand of these children and their parents benefit from the Wisconsin Shares program.