Recruitment and Enrollment Peer Exchange
An virtual peer exchange will take place April 19-20, 2016. Teams from Maryland, Nevada, and Virginia attended. During the meeting, participants discussed recruiting and enrolling families with high needs, issues around eligibility requirements and determination, braiding and blending funds, and community-level approaches to recruitment and enrollment.
Virtual Meeting Materials
Resources
Policy Briefs, Reports, and Toolkits
- Blending and Braiding Early Childhood Program Funding Streams Toolkit offers strategies, tools, resources and options to make policy choices that facilitate blending and braiding of funding streams.
- PDG Family Engagement Community of Practice offers CT’s recruitment plan in the “workspace” section. You’ll also find other resources to support effective family engagement.
- State Approaches to Family Engagement in Pre-K Programs focuses on approaches to family engagement in state funded pre-K programs. It discusses why family engagement is important, describes approaches to developing program guidance, and offers strategies to support effective implementation.
- Examples of State Guidance to Determine and Verify Income Eligibility for Prekindergarten Programs shares income eligibility guidance, tools and resources states have developed for preschool programs to use determine and verify income eligibility for and illustrates different approaches states can consider.
State Examples
- Building a Pipeline: Enrolling Children in Early Childhood Programs provides a discussion of strategies and successes of three Innovation Zones in IL in developing a “pipeline” with cross-system partners to identify and increase enrollment of children from priority population in ECE programs. (further information here)
- Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map provides information on existing services, the demographics of young children and their families, and state resources that serve young children.
- Illinois Hard to Reach Toolkit for Programs Serving Preschool Children provides guidance on recruitment and enrollment of hardest to reach families.
- Illinois Hard to Reach Families Project Evaluation describes findings and presents lessons learned and recommendations from a project to support Preschool For All providers in identifying, recruiting, and enrolling hard to reach children.
- Illinois State Board of Education Early Childhood Education Preschool Inclusion/LRE Webpage provides guidance, models, and resources to support inclusion in pre-K settings.
- Michigan – Great Start Readiness Program Participant Eligibility and Prioritization Guidelines offers a flowchart that walks the reader throuth the intake and enrollment process.
- Strategies for Enrolling Traditionally Underserved Families in Early Childhood Education Programs – This article describes how six agencies in Illinois developed strategies to recruit young children from underserved families into ECE programs.