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What's New This Month?
(latest update: November 5, 2004)
A Parent’s Guide to Choosing Safe and
Healthy Child Care
A
Parent’s Guide to Choosing Safe and Healthy Child Care is a
valuable tool for parents when starting the process of choosing
a child care setting. The National Resource Center for Health
and Safety in
Child Care (NRC) is pleased to announce this tool is now available
in Spanish,
thanks to assistance from our partner the National
Association for Child Care Resource And Referral Agencies. 13
important health and safety guidelines, identified by researchers,
are described through useful questions to ask when visiting
child care programs.
The 13 areas are based on the comprehensive Caring
for Our Children: National Health and Safety Performance Standards:
Guidelines for Out-of-Home
Child Care Programs, 2nd edition developed by the
American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health
Association and the
NRC. Areas covered are supervision, handwashing and diapering,
director qualifications, lead teacher qualifications, child:staff
ratio and group
size, immunizations, toxic substances, emergency plans, fire
drills, child abuse, medications, staff training/first aid
and playgrounds. A Parent’s Guide can be downloaded from the NRC website
(English, Spanish) for easy reproduction. Additional
resources for parents and on the topics covered in the guide can also be found on the NRC website.
New/revised state child care regulations posted on the NRC website during the month of October:
Welcome to the National Resource Center for
Health and Safety in Child Care (NRC)
The National Resource Center is located at the
University of
Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado, and is
funded by the Maternal
and Child Health Bureau, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services,
HRSA. The NRC's primary mission is to promote health and safety
in out-of-home child care settings throughout the nation.
The standard resource for information concerning
this subject is the Caring
for Our Children: National Health and Safety Performance Standards
Guidelines for Out-of-Home Child Care Programs, Second Edition
published in January 2002. The guidelines were developed through
the collaborative efforts of the American
Public Health Association, the American
Academy of Pediatrics, and the Maternal
and Child Health Bureau. The entire text of this publication
is available on this website.
Each state manages licensure of child care settings
in different ways. The licensure
regulations from the 50 states and the District of Columbia
are also available on this Website. The NRC updates this database
as changes are made.
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