Is each of our classrooms meeting our health and safety requirements?

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Narrative

Tulsa Educare has had the good fortune of growing over time, but this has made it harder to be confident that all classrooms are where they need to be on health and safety. Tulsa Educare created an Excel tool that lists the required indicators and implemented a process for collecting, analyzing, and communicating. The tool is called the Health and Safety Assessment and it was created after reviewing Oklahoma Child Care Licensing Standards, Head Start Program Performance Standards, NAEYC Standards, local Fire Marshal requirements, and their own internal Educare standards. Each classroom is visited monthly by their Quality Assurance Coordinator, who collects the data electronically on each room. The tool automatically summarizes the data at the center level in a visual way to quickly identify problem areas. The Quality Assurance Coordinator communicates the findings to the School Director or EHS Child Care Provider and to management so they can work together for improvement.

Analysis

The data is collected at the classroom level and then aggregated to the center level to identify patterns of health and safety needs. In the September 2021 data collection, Tulsa Educare found that the majority of classrooms in their newest school received “Needs Attention” ratings in several of the indicators of Food/Nutrition Safety. (See indicators 1, 2, 7, and 11 for site E4 in the visual below.)

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Sites E1, E2, and E3 also have indicators needing attention, but often just for a few classrooms each as opposed to the majority of classrooms on any one indicator. This is why Tulsa Educare will begin by focusing on site E4’s Food/Nutrition Safety concerns.

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Results

Tulsa Educare plans to provide site E4 with additional training on family style dining and CACFP requirements in order to address the majority of the “Needs Attention” items they found using this tool. They will continue to use this tool over the coming months and will closely monitor the Food/Nutrition Safety section for site E4. If the training is successful, they will see the “Needs Attention” numbers decrease in the months after the training. If they do not, Tulsa Educare will re-assess and identify additional potential solutions.


Additional details

Audience: Leadership, management

Level of Analysis: Center

Difficulty: Moderate

Content Area: Program Management

Data Sources: Microsoft Excel

Caveats: Different states and different accreditation regulations will have different areas that will need to be reviewed.


Technical Appendix

Each center has its own Excel workbook where data is stored in a different tab each month. (See Site Health & Safety Assessment Template below.) These individual Excel files link to another Excel file with a summary table which shows the number of classrooms at each scoring level for each indicator. (See Agency Health & Safety Data Trend Report Template below.) Within each tab there is a data table which includes formulas for each month for each site. The data table for each site is then linked to the Agency Health and Safety Summary. The information is automatically formulated and updated.

Download Template 1: Agency Health & Safety Data Trend Report Template

(Note: Formulas for calculations are included, but the formulas that link to the site documents are not.)

Download Template 2: Site Health & Safety Assessment Template