Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council.

Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning and welcome.

This is October 8th meeting of the Health and Safety Committee.

My name is Daryl Watson.

I'm honored to serve as the chair of this committee and the city council representing all of the fine district nine.

We have two briefings this morning and a one item on consent.

And so before we start our presentation, why don't we go around the room for some introductions?

We start on my right.

That's to you, sir.

You, sir, Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Community Soyer, District 5.

Good morning, Paul Cashman, Shout Denver District 6.

And good morning, Serena Gonzalez Gutierrez, one of your council members at large.

Alyssa, I want to check to see if there's anyone online.

I think I see some folks trying.

Oh, there's a voice.

There's a voice.

So council president Pro Temp, you might introduce yourself.

Sure.

Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

And I'm sorry I'm not there in person today.

Well, you look fantastic on virtual.

I like the jacket.

And I know Councilmember Parity just I am that is Councilman Perity on.

I think she's on our way down.

Down here.

Okay.

Well, why don't we start?

We have an honor for Elsa Holquin.

Am I pronouncing it correct?

Yes, don't pronounce the H.

Elsa, um, looking forward to your presentation for the Denver Preschool Program.

I'll turn the floor over to you to introduce yourself and any of your uh leaders that are here to help with your presentation.

Absolutely.

Well, good morning.

It is a pleasure to be here again to do my annual presentation.

This is going to be my sixth.

I have just completed six years at the Denver Preschool program.

So this is wonderful to be here.

I do have two of my colleagues that are here.

Irene Bonham, who's our director of vice president of communications, who helped us with this presentation.

And of course, Alexis Walker, which is my executive assistant, whom a lot of you get to talk to on a regular basis.

And I should also say that we have an extension of our staff, is the Office of Children's Affairs.

So I know they are here.

I don't, I'm I'm not going to do introductions of everybody, but I just want to say thank you.

Yeah, they're going to be coming up right next.

That's right.

And they are also the contract administrators for us.

So we work with them closely and they support a lot of the work that we do for the Denver Briscoe program.

So this is our annual uh report to City Council.

And yes, as a reminder, the Denver Preschool Program is the funder for Universal Preschool for the City of Denver.

In addition to providing tuition support, we also provide quality improvement resources.

And I have mentioned to you before that in the field of early education, we have to work just as hard with finding the parents as we have to do with helping the providers.

And for us, there have to be high-quality shelf care providers.

So we spend a lot of our time ensuring that we have quality providers.

We have been around since 2006.

Since our inception, we have provided 184 million of tuition credit.

So we have funded 29.6 million of quality.

And then we also started working, which I had mentioned to you as well, that we were going to expand to funding three-year-olds.

And we are now have funded them for the last three years.

We have invested $6.3 million into three-year-olds.

And we're able to help families for the last 19 years to find access to quality preschool by ensuring that we have 264 quality providers available to families.

Our philosophy is that the ESIS program is about family choice.

And so we ensure that we have a lot of resources and support so that families can find the providers that they choose.

That means that we fund uh providers that are part of Denver Public Schools.

And we find community providers that are nonprofit, for-profit, religiously affiliated, and home-based providers.

So we have the whole spectrum of providers to be able to help families.

We are primarily our funding is on a scale.

That means the higher the need, the higher the support that we're going to provide, the higher the quality, the higher the support, and also the size of the family.

So we have this tier system in which you will see that the majority of our funding is going to the highest need families.

Tier one is 135% or below of poverty level.

And if you add that to tier two, you will see that the majority of our children are at the highest need.

Our tier two goes up to 270% of poverty level, which is also where we have focused our three-year-old program.

This is primarily reflecting our four-year-old tuition support, but our three-year program is also focused on tier one and tier two as well.

We find that we have the opportunity to work with our families because we're a universal program.

And you will see that we do have some families on tier six that opt out because either they are not interested in getting the support because they don't need it, or because they are not able to participate because they don't want to have their information available to do it.

We encourage them to participate regardless of income.

So to the extent that we can, we also track the families that are not participating.

And just as a reminder as well, that we are serving 60% of all the four-year-olds in Denver.

So that's about 4,500 kids.

Our numbers have been decreasing in terms of the number of four-year-olds in Denver, which was part of the reason which we expanded to three-year-olds.

But 60% is a really great number for us to do and continually work on finding out where the other 40% and how do we support the other 40% of children.

Our demographics will also show you that we work very hard to ensure that we're finding the communities that need our highest need.

The majority of our children are children of color that participate in our preschool programs.

And we have been able to expand to all the communities that are in Denver.

So we're able to not only serve them, but we work really hard to ensure that we have the demographic information, the data, the evaluation, and the support that we're going to need.

Would you like me to stop to answer questions or just keep going?

So we'll do the questions to the end.

Thank you so much.

I'll be happy to do that.

We track quality.

Quality child care we know is the highest at the highest level that we can support them.

And we ensure that we are working with our providers to reach the highest level of quality.

For us, a minimum of level three on a scale of one to five, we work to ensure that they are part of Colorado Shines, and so they are being rated in terms of their quality.

But because this is an industry that needs a lot of support, we actually pick child care, pick up child care providers at level one, and then we grow them to a level three, and then we maintain them and enhance them from level three to level four and five.

So we have been able to do this over 19 years when we started.

By creating an incentive program in that we work with providers to say it's going to take you this work, this curriculum, this support to get you from this level to this level.

And the incentive is that we provide the coaching, we provide the training, we pay for the curriculum, we help them with the resources that they need so that they can get to the next level of quality.

And when they complete a training class, because we know that a lot of our childcare providers are working really long and hard hours.

So if we're asking them to take additional training, they are doing this on the evenings or on the weekends to just ensure that they can get to the next level of training.

So when they complete the training, we give them a bonus, and we also give the center a bonus for participating and ensuring that they are getting to a higher level of quality.

As you can imagine, our providers love to be part of the Denver Preschool program because we're not mandating that this is the things that they have to do, but we're right there with them to say how do we get you to the next level?

Because the reality is that in this industry there are no resources.

They don't have additional funding.

So for us to comply with requirements means we have to also invest in ensuring that they have those requirements.

And you will see that the majority of our providers, 70% are at level four.

So we are constantly working with getting providers to that level and higher levels.

Our quality improvement dollars are very important.

They are even more important when we are in a crisis situation as we are right now.

Our childcare providers are in a very difficult space.

They don't have enough funding.

You have heard some of the reports about CCAP and where the funding has been frozen.

We are carefully watching, you know, any of the federal funding that may be changed.

And it becomes even more critical and more important that we have a local organization that can provide the support, especially at this time.

So our quality improvement dollars are substantial.

Last year we put 3.6 million dollars into quality improvement.

That meant that 264 providers were able to get access to support.

86 of those providers were at Denver Public Schools.

Six family child care homes and 172 child care centers.

And we have also been providing stipends to ensure that we can maintain the workforce, which as you know is not always paid at the level that they need to be paid.

So they are a we provide stipends to ensure continuing care, to support to support the centers to ensure that they can continue to be open.

We have also provided 555, 15,000 in quality grants, strengthening grants, I'm sorry, in strengthening grants to the organization.

This is the incentive program that we have had in place, and 410,000 in quality initiative grants.

So we work very closely with the providers to say these are the resources that you have in place.

It is unique, especially in these times of need, when we see other communities that do not have a Denver Preschool program and the realities that they are confronting because unlike the COVID pandemic, where there was some government funding for some of our providers, we don't have that right now.

Our providers are going through a crisis without any support.

And so if it wasn't for the Denver Preschool program, they will have zero.

So it is very important that we're there.

They know they depend on us and they know that it's very important for us to provide this support.

So 1.5 million in grants to our providers is most critical at this point.

Our value to the community.

Fourth, because we have added one on workforce, that we have been putting into place at the Denver Preschool program since the very beginning.

We have a longitudinal evaluation that we have been tracking our children since the very beginning of our program.

Our first cohort is now in their second year of post-secondary education, and we're now partnering with Prosperity Denver and Caring for Denver to see where their connections with participants in other programs.

We just sign agreements with Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Education, Department of Health, and Criminal Justice to start tracking our young adults as they enter the workforce so that we can also see where they end up in their careers.

We do already have the research that shows that our program gets children ready for preschool, gets them ready for life, and they do better in their ability to be successful in kindergarten, they do better in second grade reading, they do better when they do to middle school, more likely to graduate.

So we already have that information.

Now we're tracking them as to what's going to happen when they become adults.

We have the second largest data system in the country only behind Head Start.

So we are able to provide that data and resources and evaluation that I think is so compelling, which has helped us to get the funding, the ongoing funding for the Denver Preschool program.

We know that the economic benefits are substantial and that every dollar invested in early childhood has a very high return on investment.

Parents need us in order to be able to go to work, to go to school, to survive.

It is critical for them.

Denver has become a very expensive city.

Housing being at the top of the cost, closely followed by childcare.

And so for young families of Denver, we are the providers that are able to help them and support them.

We know that investing in early education means that we also have healthy communities and we're able to show the support that is there.

Success stories also include the fact that we have 95% of our parents that are telling us they love the Denver Preschool program, are highly satisfied with the services that we provide.

We have the longitudinal studies, and we know that over four years, the Denver Preschool program generates 42.3 million in citywide savings.

And this is reducing remediation costs, which means repeating a grade is going to cost us, preserving that per pupil funding because they are able to stay in Denver and boosting family income, which is substantial at this point.

We have also become in the last couple of years, the local coordinating organization for the state universal preschool program, commonly known as LCOs, local coordinating organizations, which means we are the intermediary to help access federal funding for these for our children.

We work with them in developing the program for universal preschool and the department of early childhood.

So we were able to provide them the support that they need.

And as a result, we also knew that we were going to be big players as the implementation came for universal preschool.

The Universal Preschool program at the state level is mandated to provide at least three hours a day of preschool, that is 15 hours.

But what we also know is that the majority of our families need a full and extended care.

80% of our families need more than three hours a day.

So we are able to start to put together what is much more affordable to families.

The cost of care of Denver is at about $1,500, which means that if DPP is paying $657, and UPK average contribution is $625, that you have a reduced admin needs for families.

I'm going to remind you that this is average.

And I'm also going to remind you that $1,500 is average.

We know that for a lot of our families, that is a very low cost.

It is not unusual for us to find families that are paying $2,000 a month or more for preschool.

And at our highest level of support for the families that I was showing you on tier one, our highest level of support, our tuition support is $1,300 a month.

So we are substantial funders.

So if you put the $1,300 a month, plus the support that they are also have themselves with the universal preschool program, we're able to support them at the highest level of that they need.

And our three-year old program is also ensuring them that parents can actually have two years of preschool, not just one year of preschool, which is unbelievable what parents tell us that they are able to do when you give them an extra year of preschool.

Our families tell us they are able to put down payment for a house, buy a car, go back to school.

If they know that they have the ability to have preschool for two years.

Originally authorized in 2006, we had a sunset provision that we had to go back to the voters every 10 years.

We went early in 2014.

Reminder that we barely passed in 2006, barely, like one percent.

We did a little bit better in 2014.

And then thank goodness that we went back early instead of 2026.

And this reauthorization was at 78% support.

And it was also, the sunset provision was also removed.

So we became a permanently funded program in Denver, which for which we are thankful that what really help us is that we had unanimous support from city council, and we were able to go to the ballot ready to say this is this is the results of what we have provided.

And we're starting to in the middle of the crisis because we realize that our providers are in a crisis, and there is a lot of changes that are still happening.

We're in the middle of strategic planning.

We're not doing strategic planning to see what we're going to do the next year or the next three years.

We're really doing strategic planning to see what is the big next for the Denver Preschool program.

What do we want to do in the next five to ten years as we get ready to celebrate our 20th anniversary next year?

I think it is appropriate for us to look and see what's what's the next thing that is going to happen.

And in that spirit, our board has authorized us to do a pilot to start looking at zero to three, um, and we're partnering with life spans, um, the local new organization in Southwest Denver, Blossom House, which has a child care center that is going to be run by Mao High Early Learning.

They're going to be our first pilot to start looking at zero to three and look at what is next for the Denver Preschool program.

We're very excited about this pilot, but we're also aware that we have to continue to do a lot of the work at the local level.

So right now we are the strategic plan will be done at the end of this year.

We're getting ready to do a celebration.

We don't know exactly what that celebration is going to look like next year because we realize that this is not the place where providers are celebrating because they are struggling, but something that is appropriate that honors our providers that honors our families and really shows the impact that we have had.

As part of that, we're also doing some rebranding of the Denver Preschool program as we look at possibilities for growth and possibilities for expansion on the next 20 years.

And we're very excited to see what we can do next.

And when that happens, we want to be ready with plans.

We want to be ready to help our providers, and we want to be ready to better help our families.

So thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you so much, CEO Ogin.

Uh, I gotta tell you, there is no bad time to celebrate the good work that you all are doing.

So even as we are pushing forward in these difficult times, um, we look forward to finding ways where we can celebrate with you and the team and all the folks who've done all the great work for Denver Preschool.

So thank you so much for your presentation.

We have a full queue.

I want to first start with Councilperson of Pro Tem, Romero Campbell.

I'm not sure if you were wanted to join the queue, and I want to give you the first opportunity to jump on in.

Um, and if not, then I'll we'll go to Councilmember Cashman and Councilmember Flynn.

So let's just let me wait for a second to see Council President Pro Tem.

Has any questions?

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

And thank you, Elsa, for the presentation.

It's always exciting to hear how far and how DPP has changed and evolved to respond to what the community needs are now.

And so I just wanted to commend you for that work and for the long, and for your entire uh team for all the work that you've done and the evaluation components.

I did have a question about the zero to three component of that.

And I know it's going to be piloted, but are you also looking at other capacity building or additional organizations across the city?

Yes, thank you.

Thank you for the question.

Yes, as part of our strategic planning, we were so extremely lucky that we became one of the sites for a uh fellowship that is um part of a Harbor Law, Harvard School project.

And this is the Billy and Melinda Gates project where they have 12 fellows across the country working in early childhood.

Our director of evaluation, Dr.

Christelle Cisneros, is one of those fellows.

And she has been working on looking at what are the other needs that we have not been meeting in Denver.

As you know, we are really focused on equity.

So in addition to looking at what are the needs, we're also selecting six communities, which we call child care deserts, the six communities that we can all think of, and looking at those six communities where we could potentially do expansions by looking at this model.

So we have you know us very well.

So you know that we have the tuition credit scale, which is one of the targeted universal models.

Our three-year-old program is it starts with families under 270% of poverty level, and it gives them two years of free preschool.

So that's another level of targeted program.

And then the next model will be targeted neighborhoods, so that we can do this geographic expansion to say uh what it is.

We are dreaming of the day that we can go to these communities and say, what if the Denver Preschool program could go to a um child care desert and be able to pay for every single child in that program and be able to make it financially sustainable so that we have centers that are successful in those communities?

That's the big dream.

We're not there yet.

We haven't figured it out, but that's what we're thinking about.

We're at the pilot stage and not figuring out you know what could be the possibility in the future.

I I'm excited to hear more.

Um, it sounds exciting um to be able to think about that.

We know how tremendous um early intervention and early education is.

So I just um commend you on that work moving forward and look forward to learning more about it in the future.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President Pratem.

Um, and we'd like to welcome Councilmember Parity, and then we'll go to the queue, starting first with Councilmember Cashman and Councilmember Flynn.

Thank you.

Committee chair.

Thank you also for what you're doing to take care of our youngest.

Um, and just a quick comment on number uh on child care.

I've never had heard 1500.

It's always seems to be 2,000 or more.

And when you realize that's for one kid.

And our families very frequently have more than one, it becomes breathtaking the expense, and we need to do better supporting that system.

Um, so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about you mentioned it at the very beginning, your partnership with our Office of Children's Affairs.

What role do they play in this program?

Yeah, so as um, as a contractor with the city of Denver, um, our contract um has the Office of Children's Affairs as the contract administrator.

And so that means that as the contract administrator, they are participating and uh overseeing all our funds.

They we meet with them on a regular basis.

They come to all our board meetings.

They are our liaison to reports to city council, knock on wood.

Or if you have questions about legal issues that may come up, is how we access a lot of the resources.

So we partner with them in a lot of projects, but we are also aware that we also have the contracting obligation with the Office of Children's Affairs.

They receive our financial audit.

So we have a financial audit, they receive all the documentation on our annual report, and so they are able to monitor how the Denver Preschool program is doing.

And is there um fee programs OCA?

We don't have a fee that we pay to the Office of Children's Affairs.

Um we were reminded that we were the first um local, the first partner organization that was created that was outside of the city of Denver.

So it has always been a partnership with the Office of Children's Affairs.

Yeah, interesting.

Yes, staffing is down.

It seems that perhaps some sort of administrative fee would be appropriate, but that's a longer discussion.

Um, let's see.

Okay, that that's all I've got, Mr.

Chair.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Elsa.

Thank you, Councilman Cashman.

Councilmember Flynn.

One question on the slide for, and maybe it's because my kids are all out and the grandkids are the responsibility of my kids.

I have don't have a good picture, but about 4500 uh youth served, seems kind of low to me.

Do we have an idea of what the population is that could be served and what percentage of that is served by the 4500 number?

Yeah.

And then further, uh, what kind of outreach or engagement are you doing so that people with children at home know that this exists?

Yes, so um yeah, for many years, our population for four-year-olds used to be at about 8,000 four-year-olds in Denver.

It has decreased.

So the 4500 that we're serving that is at about um uh 60% of all the four-year-olds.

And we track closely, as we have been doing some of our work with um our strategic planning.

We have actually been working closely with the demographer, the state demographer, to look at the numbers, the number of four-year-olds, the number of young children in Denver as a whole has decreased.

Our number of four-year-olds have decreased, the number of three-year-olds have decreased, is part of the reason why you're seeing also some of the closures with Denver Public Schools.

And um, and because of that, um, our numbers have gone slightly down.

We knew this was going to happen.

We knew this was coming.

The cost of housing is so high in Denver that we knew we were already losing some of our families.

And the families that were losing in Denver are not just extremely poor families.

We're working, losing working class families, teachers, police officers, firefighters that can no longer afford to live in Denver.

The majority of our childcare teachers do not live in Denver.

Um it is it is an expensive city.

So because of that, our focus has been, we knew we were coming.

So that's part of the reason why we expanded to start serving three-year-olds with the hope that if we're able to help families for two years, then we may be able to retain them in Denver.

If we can help them, if we can help them for longer than that, then it's more likely that we can keep them in Denver.

So that's about 60%.

Um across the country, preschool is available to about 40% of our children.

So we are way above the average number that we have across the country.

Because of the program.

Because of the program.

And um our outreach is extensive.

Um we do everything from uh we have a team, a subcontractor that has a team of community workers from motoras that are in the community that speaks several languages that are in the community recruiting the families that we need.

We partner with a lot of our council members to actually participate on some of the events in their districts to be able to have booths.

We are at close to 95 events.

Every event that you can think of in the city, we're there with the booth, providing support and availability to the families.

We are also out in the community with partners.

So we have a lot of nonprofit organizations that help us recruit some of the families, some of the children.

Children to participate in the program.

But probably our most extensive recruitment actually comes from the providers themselves because the child care providers are the ones who are receiving the families that are trying to access services and realizing that they cannot afford it.

So most of our requests come from child care providers that said here is a funding source that you can access for some of those resources.

We have been enhancing and improving a lot of our website and our online processing because we know that families need to have access to information.

It is a complicated system.

It is difficult for families to navigate it.

So we spend a lot of time figuring out how do we make it easier for them to come.

Our website has access to list of providers.

They can search by a provider close to their home or a provider close to their work.

We have a calculator so they can access and enter some information and they can have an idea of how much money they could potentially get from us.

So when they are looking for providers, they have a sense of how much is it going to cost them and what we could potentially help them.

We are enhancing the program, and we hope that in the very near future, they are going to be able to see where there are openings.

So they are not just able to see where there is a provider, but how many openings are at that site, and not be searching around for who may have an opening for many of us that have had to do that.

We know how crazy it is because what you get is a list, and that doesn't work as well as saying here are two openings, here are two places where they can do it.

So we on the one side we're enrolling the provider, on the other side, we're helping the families.

The families can enroll on their phone.

Our application is super easy.

Uh they can call, we have multiple languages available, they can make do it online, and we are constantly monitoring how easy is it to use the application, how long does it take them?

Uh, what else can we do to enhance our ability to find families?

And we continually do that support.

We started to expand during the pandemic, COVID pandemic, to um find some of our children, which we knew a lot of them were at home with their parents and had no support.

So we started funding some of the services at libraries.

So we have a partnership with Denver Public Library for Little University, so that they can have access.

We know that our families trust libraries, so if nothing else, they can start with the library and then um started working with some home visiting programs so that we can see if we can also start to graduate some of those home visiting programs into a place where families can trust, where they can go, and then get them into the preschool program.

So we work um year-round to find the families that may need it.

And we know we're never going to get to 100%, but but it's we is something that we're constantly working on.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

That uh for the 10 years I've been here, that is one of the most comprehensive and complete answers.

Oh, thank you.

They answered everything and it gave me great great comfort and confidence in your program.

So I really, really appreciate the completeness of that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Flynn.

We've got about 10 more minutes, maybe a little bit more.

So encourage council members, uh, one question, and maybe we have more time to go back into the two.

Councilmember Alvidras and then Councilmember Perry.

Thank you.

I did have similar questions, so that's helpful that that part's out of the way.

But I think something that's confusing to young parents, or you know, parents to little little ones, is when you go to the preschool program, you know, that variety of costs.

So I may find out that it's going to cost me a thousand dollars still with the credit and then give up.

You know, and so I'm curious why is the cost so ranging.

Can we get a consistency?

We're never gonna get to free for everyone if it's up and down, depending on where you go.

And DPS has, in my opinion, done a great job.

Uh, my son went to preschool at Denver Public Schools, and so I'm curious like, are you seeing different outcomes with the private sector versus the public school system and what um why is it easily free?

It's right in your neighborhood for public school, and so complicated when you're looking at other programs.

Yes.

Um, yes, we um we know that it is complicated for our families to figure out what are the choices that may be available.

So uh I just as a reminder, about 60% of our funding goes to Denver Public Schools.

So we fund the programs that are then by public schools, but what we also know is that for some families that is the preferred choice, it is less expensive because at DPS, they also have access to free buildings, uh, PPOR, and other resources.

So they are able to provide a more affordable options to family, but that doesn't always work for a lot of our families who need year-round um care.

And DPS is typically um nine months per year, and some of them that prefer a community provider because of access or language issues or cultural or whatever resource they may need.

So, because of that is this very expensive opportunity of home-based providers, community providers, religiously affiliated providers, whatever it is that the family prefers.

We try to be as um helpful as we can in giving them that calculation, in ensuring that they know the cost of that provider so that they can they know when they are reaching out, how much is it going to be?

And then um, you know, if we had more funding, when we have more funding, we actually started um one of our other pilot programs is a scholarship because we know that even after we provide with tuition support, we have some working families, the Cliff effect, all those things that we know about, that even with the tuition support, they are still not able to access the resources that they care.

So we we're starting, we have been expanding that scholarship program to say can we help them a little bit more to be able to do it at the national level.

We know that the goal is that a family that all that the family can really support is no more than 7% of their income.

So for us, we we say what can we do to lower it to 7% or even less, because we know for some of our families, even 7% of their income is not affordable to be able to do that, some kind of that support.

That is the reason why.

When we started that three-year-old program, we were able to tell our families that at 270% of poverty rate, which is about 85,000 for a family of four, they could expect two years of free preschool.

And say we will come in and we will pay the preschool support that you need to be able to make it because is the it that's just a reality that we're in that is very very expensive.

The cost varies because of the variety of providers that we have, and it is also expensive because we're also asking for quality, and even at the quality level, we still need to support the providers because they don't have enough resources.

The other thing that, as you know, the younger the kids are, the high, the lower the ratios are.

So the cost goes is extremely high to be able to provide that support.

But for a lot of our community supporters, they don't have any other funding sources.

I appreciate that.

I think one thing that's hard as a parent is just am I picking what's best for my kid?

Is the free option what's best for paying this much money a month is going to make a difference?

But I know we only get one question.

No, and I just go to our website because we actually help them say this is the questions to ask.

This is what quality means.

This is how to do it.

Yeah, it's still confusing.

I know.

It is confusing.

And it requires a lot of one-on-one navigation.

Thank you, Councilmember Alvidras and Councilmember Perry and Sawyer.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I to that question, Councilmember Alviders.

One of the things that I always want to point out about DPP is that there's another equity impact, which is that to some extent, kids who can't afford the incredibly expensive private preschools, then can afford to go to those preschools.

And so there's like this minor integration impact, and what is otherwise this like incredibly, you know, uh non-integrated private market, you know, like free-for-all, unfair.

Um yeah, unfair.

And so, and it's just what happens when we because we never did universal child care back in the 70s.

Um, but my question is about um CCAP and UPK and DPP, which I know has been um it is actually taking time for everyone to figure out.

Um, I'm concerned about the um effective cuts to CCAP because they're switching to counting enrollment, um, and I'm understanding that those are going to be really felt in 2026.

Um, do I understand correctly that CCAP is um CCAP funds child care generally?

So does that include both like preschool, out of school time, summer, and then even like younger like babies, like zero to three, or is it okay?

Um, and so then we have OCA funding where we fund some out of school time at summer time, and then DPP is like that school chunk.

Um, so I think my question is how you're thinking about the change to CCAP and whether DPP will be able to do anything to kind of um compensate for those for families that are uh losing CCAP.

Yeah.

So we just signed um a data sharing agreement with the Denver Department of Human Services.

That's exciting.

Yes, and we reach out to them and said, we want to help you navigate that wait list.

Um give us the names of the people that are on that wait list, the three and four-year-olds that are on that wait list that we can help so that we can reach out to the families and say let us help you, um, and access um the Denver Prisco program resources.

So it is, and through that, we will also be able to access the state UPK funding.

Yes, and and some of those families simply just don't know where else to go because they they know CCAP, so it's back to um to that concern that was raised that was just raised to say we helped them navigate some of that.

So we are doing that.

We're sharing um this agreement with the other local coordinating organizations, there are 32 of them across the state, so they can start reaching out to their Department of Human Services and saying what can we do to help these families.

My aid just texted me, thank God, and I agree.

Thank you for that.

Because we've been very worried about it, and it just um the complexity is so high that I I appreciate how hard DPP works to cut through complexity, like because that's not easy.

And Councilman Flynn, I just wanted to say anecdotally, like having experienced this, I have a three-year-old and a seven-year-old.

Um, and we, when my daughter was turning three and four years old, um, I guess at that time, four years old, we were we saw DPP everywhere.

Like, I don't think we could have missed it.

And granted, I'm like a high information, you know, person, but they were at free days at the museum.

Um, they were at, I mean, I think we got something in the mail, like, so I mean, we did not miss it, and that isn't to say nobody does, but I mean, I remember being so um struck by that.

So, for what that's worth, like experientially, you guys are doing an amazing job.

And having a three year old, in a minute.

I love that for you.

Thanks, Mr.

Chair.

Thank you.

Uh Councilmember Sawyer.

Thanks.

Um, thank you so much, Elsa.

This is amazing, and also it's really great to see you.

It's good to see you.

Um, I do have a question, and I'm looking on page nine of the community report, and so there's five uh QRIS assessment areas, right?

Um DPP is significantly ahead of the state average in three of them.

Um that's amazing, particularly number four, which is learning environment.

Like that's extraordinary.

So congratulations on that.

We're at 70% of providers, and the state averages 23%.

Yeah.

Um, so that's absolutely amazing.

We are behind in one and two workforce qualifications and professional development is one and family partnerships is two.

I'm just for those watching at home who are they're not looking at what I'm looking at here, and there's not a slide on it.

Yeah, um, but I'm curious whether, given that there's a gap there and area of improvement in one and two, um, particularly around professional development.

Are you have you talked to Dito?

Have you are you working with our department of economic development in their workforce area to see if there's some ways to leverage other partnerships with the city to improve those numbers a little bit?

Yes, thank you so much.

Well, first I think I'll tell you that Adi is on our board.

Oh, great.

So we do talk to the lot.

And um, the way that we do our professional development, because we were there right at the beginning.

We actually had to go and create some of those training programs.

So one of our the training programs that we have been funding is a certificate program at Mahai Early Learning.

And they have been doing it for probably 12 years.

So we had been funding them and funding them.

And it took us a long time to get child care as one of the recognized workforce investment opportunities in the city.

But we finally got it.

And two years ago, Mahai Early Learning got two million dollars from uh workforce dollars to invest into uh the development of teachers in early childhood.

So we feel like it was really worth it for us to pay for those 12 years, and we hope that that is a model that is going to continue that we're going to have workforce dollars come into early childhood in a more supportive way because we need it.

We've been doing this solo, and many of our professional development work is paid by the teachers themselves.

And that's why you see, you know, the most that we have in them is give them a tax credit.

And that's not enough for teachers that are making minimum wage to say how do we do this process.

So yes and yes, and we will continue to awesome.

Well, it's great to hear that Adib is on your board.

I think that's fantastic, and that's I'm if there's anything we can do to help um, you know, foster some of these uh opportunities to help you guys and support you all and and also the you know staff and families, let us know.

Yeah.

Yeah, thank you so much.

And I'm not gonna distill the talking points, but the office of children's affairs can tell you about some of the planning that we're doing together, to create a better system.

Okay, fantastic.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Sawyer.

Um fantastic presentation.

Great information.

Um, folks that are listening want to know how to get a hold of uh dpp or to get some of this information.

Is there uh somewhere on the web that they can go to that you would recommend for them to have more of this information?

Absolutely.

So dpp.org is um info at dpp.org.org where you can get information.

You can get access to our information in terms of how to sign up, what are the resources, even if you just want to list the who are the providers, who are these people, what are they telling the parents?

How easy is it for the providers to navigate the site?

Come there.

Um, we'll be happy to do that.

Well, see you all in, we're gonna have a whole hour for you next time because this is just fantastic information.

Thank you for being um fully understanding on the full the complexity of this process and then making it so simple uh for us around the table and hopefully for the folks who are viewing to understand.

So thank you and your team for being so prepared.

Um and so we're gonna transition to your good friends and partners from the Office of Children's Affairs.

Absolutely.

I'm gonna say a really quick thing.

I just noticed this is one of my daughter's best friends.

Oh, you know, for planting pictures.

I was gonna say we have the best picture on the whole spot.

Oh my goodness.

So we'll take just a quick minute for Office of children's Affairs through transition.

And then we'll roll into our next uh briefing.

Thank you so much, CEO.

Great job.

Thank you.

And whenever OCA is ready, I'll have you introduce yourselves.

Um your presentation on Denver Great Kids Head Start program.

And I can introduce yourself around the table.

Well, thank you, Council Chair.

Thank you, City Council members.

My name is Rackiteras.

I work in the Office of Children's Affairs.

I'll let Dr.

Alan Lori introduce themselves.

Yes, uh, my name is Al Martinez.

I'm the Head Start Executive Director.

And my name is Lori Medina, I'm the assistant Head Start Director.

First of all, just thank you for having us this morning.

We're really excited to share some of the great work that Denver Great Kids Head Start has been leading in Denver.

It's great that we get to be here right after Denver Preschool program so you can kind of see the whole a good scope of what the early childhood education landscape looks like here in Denver.

I know that there's been a lot of the Head Start contracts coming through City Council.

So we definitely want to give some context to all those items that have been coming through, but also highlight some of the great work that Dr.

Al and the Head Start team have been doing here in Denver.

Just to give you a little bit of an oversight of where we're going to be heading in this presentation.

We'll give you a little bit of a backstory on Head Start as a program.

It's a federally funded program, so we'll give a little bit of that background.

And I'm a former social studies teacher, so I have to have some history lesson woven into it.

We'll give you a little bit of a view of the Head Start structure here in Denver.

So you'll see that it's more than just a program, it's a program and an ecosystem that supports children, families, and providers.

We'll get into a breakdown of the financial aspect of the program, highlight some of the success the programs had here recently, and then leave plenty of time for questions at the end.

I'll pass it over to Dr.

L.

Thank you, Ray.

Good morning, Council members.

As I mentioned, my name is Dr.

R.

Martinez, and I've had the privilege, and I really mean privilege of uh directing the Head Start program for the past 18 years.

Uh prior to coming to the city, uh I actually worked at the Federal Office of Head Start where I was a program specialist, and later I was the area program manager.

Uh and I worked there for over 30 years.

Uh then I came to the city.

So uh Lori and I are so happy to be able to talk about something that is near and dear to our heart, and that is uh Head Start.

So just uh a little bit of uh okay, it's a yeah uh well in the beginning it was called Project Head Start, and it was launched in 1965 as an eight-week demonstration project under President Johnson's war on poverty effort.

Um it has grown to approximately 1,600 uh grantees around the country and uh trust territories.

Uh it expanded to full day full year in 1978.

Uh in 1995, uh it was another big change in Head Start.

Early Head Start was created to serve infants, toddlers, and pregnant women.

Prior to that time, it was ages three to five.

Over 30 million children have participated in Head Start since its inception.

The City and County of Denver became a Head Start agency in 1996, and we have served over 35,000 children in our history.

We just celebrated our 60th anniversary of Head Start and the 30th anniversary uh of the city being a grantee uh at a big celebration at the botanic gardens this past spring.

We move to the next one.

So, as uh Rhett mentioned, this is really our ecosystem.

This is our overall organizational structure, and it begins in the Office of Children's Affairs.

We have been a part of the Office of Children's Affairs since there was an Office of Children's Affairs.

They were almost co-created.

Uh we serve 1,112 children, uh 1,038 children in preschool Head Start and 74 uh children uh in early Head Start.

On the left-hand side, there's really our organizational structure, and uh it is unlike uh very many uh in HISHA programs across the country because for the most part they are community-based organizations, grassroots organizations, in some cases school districts.

Uh it's rare that there would be uh a municipality, not impossible, but rare, that would serve as a head start grantee.

So our governing body includes uh representatives from uh either the the person or representative from the mayor's office, the city council uh the city auditor the chief financial officer uh the city controller and the office of human resources executive director our current council representative is councilwoman uh vidres and and prior to her it was councilwoman uh sawyer so uh there's some knowledge at the table thank you uh and our policy council which is also part of our governance structure is comprised of 23 members uh this includes 14 parents uh two per delegate agencies and nine community reps for the community reps uh five of the of these members are nominated by the mayor's office and four are nominated by city council but all of these members need to be approved by the policy council uh in this and let's see uh at the bottom I'm sorry on the right is a list of all of our delegate agencies and their funded enrollment for either Head Start or early Head Start and you can see one to four of them uh provide Head Start and early Head Start so in their case it's a zero to five programming at the bottom left is our Health and Mental Health Services Advisory Committee this is a grantee-wide advisory committee that helps us shape policy and and practice and programs in the area of health and wellness and mental health and at the very bottom supplemental services are our four major contracts I think Lori will talk about we have we've got actually 11 uh different uh vendor agencies that we work with but four major contracts with uh Denver health and hospitals for health services and mental health services and dental we have disability services at Seoul Child Development and nutrition services with uh uh Denver Health WIC all right and so again nice as I mentioned Lori will talk more about these vendors in a bit this is now I think this is really what sets Head Start apart from many other programs and that's the shared decision making model in addition to the funding model for example funding comes directly from the Office of Head Start to local recipients there's no pass-through and uh it's also important that uh the policy council the role that it plays it number one it has to be comprised of a majority so if that's 51% have to be parents of children who are enrolled in the program and then community reps.

The policy council really are co-equal decision makers with the governing body and in the Head Start world they are as important as the governing body they have to be involved in in many of the functions and decisions that we make as a program related to staffing planning policy formulation selection criteria grant goals and objectives and they have to approve our application before the governing body can act and so and that is by design you know parent involvement parent engagement was a hallmark of these great society programs and the effort uh they they called it at in the 65 the war on poverty in up and out of poverty was the philosophy uh of uh head start in those early days and it still is I believe so uh laurie's gonna talk to you about some of the next uh some of the cool things that we do so well our seven delegate agencies sorry I don't want one more I don't want to miss them so Clayton uh early learning is there in center of mile higher early learning volunteers of America on the left side Catholic charities family star on the right side uh Denver Public Schools and Sewell Child Development now Catholic charities, Clayton, Mile High, and DPS were charter members and have been part of Head Start since the very beginning.

They were at the table when the application was written at somebody's, I think it was somebody's kitchen table, actually.

Uh, where Mayor Webb's leadership so uh those are our delegates.

The other two were added in in our procurement uh we procure our contracts every five years.

And Family Star has been added as well as Volunteers of America and VO and School, child development.

They've all been added through procurement.

So sorry, Lori.

I didn't know that.

So thank you, Dr.

Martinez.

Dr.

Al, when we get to work every day, he always reminds us how lucky we are to do this work.

And I've been with Head Start for about 30 years, and with Denver Great Kids for the past eight.

Dr.

Al talked about our seven delegate agencies.

In addition to that, we have a lender, 11 vendor agencies that we work with in contract with.

The vendors provide either direct or support services to the children, families, and the staff at the delegate level, and it's in one or more of these areas.

It's important to note that because of economies of scale, we're able to negotiate at a larger level, and we can contract with the experts so everyone benefits.

One such expert, like Dr.

Al said, is that it has come through you guys is our Denver Health and Hospital Authority contract.

We use them for nurse consultation, also for dental.

We do dental screens for the children.

We use them for the mental health consultation, and then we also contract for women, infants, and children or WIC at our sites.

So it's always so exciting to talk about our five by five program around Denver.

This was something that we always envied when I was working in another county in Aurora and Head Start because Denver has the 5x5 program.

Five by five is a school readiness program, and its purpose is to connect our classrooms to cultural venues and to their community.

It's only available for Denver Great Kids Head Start.

And however, I will say that in the classrooms where our children are sitting next to maybe a child that's funded by another organization, we do make those classrooms whole.

So our enrollment is 11 12.

However, our card count last year was right around 3,000.

We give this benefit to all of the delegate staff and also to the vendor staff.

Our partners include the Denver Zoo, the aquarium, our children can go and up to six family members, and then the staff can take themselves and up to three more family members, so four total.

Next month in November, we will be attending our own performance at the Colorado Ballet for the Nutcracker, and that's been going on for several years.

It's exciting.

The children get really dressed up.

It's in the evening time, so it's just like a night out on the town for them.

So what's OCA's role?

Well, first and foremost, we're housed in the Office of Children's Affairs.

We do have a partnership with the Department of Finance, so we're able to administer the Head Start funds, and then we're also ensuring fiscal accountability through the systems that they have in place.

The most important takeaway here for Denver Great Kids Head Start is that we do write the Head Start grant.

We write the program goals and the objectives, and then our team works directly with the delegate agencies.

They're writing their own grant, but their goals and objectives will directly be in line with ours.

So we're all heading to quality outcomes.

We ensure implementation of the Head Start Performance Standards, and we have a team of eight.

We're mighty, but we're always out in sites, and we're doing monitoring for the implementation of the Head Start Performance Standards in all content areas.

We're able to provide professional development for the staff.

We support parent trainings, and then we have an amazing parent events as well.

And we do this all for 88 classrooms and 31 centers around the Denver metro area.

So, what's our financial breakdown down?

The Office of Head Start gives us over $14 million dollars, and we're very proud to say that 87% of this goes right back out the door to our delegate agencies, and then also those vendor contracts.

The third line here are the city personnel costs.

That's Denver Great Kids Head Start, and then also our partnership with the Department of Finance.

Now, this last line, operational costs, a little over $400,000.

I want to tell you that also goes back out the door.

So when our team are in the classrooms or we're doing any of the monitoring, if there's anything that we see that the sites need, we're able to provide supplies, materials, professional development, lots of books, multicultural items.

So we retain that money back in our office to provide that continuous ongoing improvement.

It's always excited to talk about the why.

So we do all of this, and this is just one slide about our child outcomes for the last program year.

We use Teaching Strategies Gold as an assessment system.

Really, all delegates use it to track a whole child's development over time.

You can see that there are three formal checkpoints: fall, winter, and spring.

And really, there are about 30 different objectives that the children are assessed on.

But in this slide, we've chosen just to talk about the broader domains.

You can see that our children have made great growth from fall to the spring scores.

I think that the next slide will talk, and this is really what I think sets Head Start aside from any other program, is that we provide intensive family services.

So while the children in the classroom and their learning, the families, we're also working with them to help them attain their goals.

So we do a family outcome survey with all of our delegates, and the parents are able to provide a snapshot of their own opinions and their experiences while they're participating in Head Start.

We utilize this data to talk about and really celebrate our strengths, which we're not very good at because we're always on to the next continuous improvement plan.

But it's important to know that 92% of our families felt that the chat the program was very helpful for their child, and 88% also felt that we did support them as well.

This is another slide on our family outcomes survey.

And it's important to note that the department, I remember the Office of Head Start has what's called the parent family community engagement framework.

The seven outcomes on the bottom are what we're trying to make sure that we're supporting our families in.

So we ask a lot of questions in the survey, and the parents are able to tell us what we've done really well.

The blue bars are obviously where we have been very helpful, as identified by the families, and then the orange on the top would be where we're gonna sit down and use this as data for our self-assessment, and again, making changes for the following program year.

I'd like to say thank you to the council and open it up for questions.

Thank you so much for the uh presentation.

We do have a queue.

Wanted to check to see if Council President Pro Tem or Mara Campbell had any initial questions.

And if not, we'll jump into the queue with Councilmember Sawyer and Councilmember Alpha.

Um, good, just thank you for the presentation.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Thank you, Council President Pro Tem.

So, Councilmember Sawyer, Councilmember Alvidras.

Thanks, Mr.

Chair.

Hi guys.

It's so good to see you.

Um, so for those of you who don't know, I sat on the board of Great Kids Head Start for five years.

It was my absolute honor.

And I do not have a question.

I just wanted to say your presentation was great, and you guys sell yourselves so short.

Like it wasn't enough.

The things that you do for families in Denver every single day, like, be good, be better to yourselves.

There's so much more that you do than what you just told us about.

Um, you are an extraordinary program and do extraordinary things, and I wish you would have said more about all of that because um, because while this is fantastic, and you should be really proud of the work that you do, like that is not the soul of who you are as Denver Great Kids Head Start.

And um, and so I just want you all to know that there's like so much more going on than what we just saw right here, um, even though what we saw right here was really, really fantastic.

So thank you for everything you do.

You guys are special and unique in so many ways in our city, um, and we're just really grateful.

Thank you.

Um I'll answer that comment.

Mostly because I erred at the beginning by not acknowledging that a lot of the Head Start team is behind us here.

Um, and with us in the room.

And just to retweet what you said, the amount of times I hear them at 6 p.m.

on a on a weeknight talking to an individual parent who needs something that maybe is not in the scope of what Head Start provides.

Uh, these are public servants at the highest order, and uh it's a privilege to get to work with them and see them do the work that they do.

Um, so just gratitude to them.

I know Dr.

Allen Lori are uh historically and famously uh humble people and the whole program is, but uh I like to brag on them when I get the chance to.

So I appreciate that that you open me up for that one.

You're welcome.

Thanks.

Thank you so much.

Councilmember Alviders.

Thank you.

I couldn't agree more, and it's been an honor to serve now, and more than anything to learn.

Uh, you know, I feel like my role here is like learning from you all in all your years of helping families, and as a mom I'll say, the hardest thing I've ever done is become a mom.

And so the way you wrap your arms around these parents, not just the kid, like the whole family and their needs is really meaningful, especially because you are serving the most low-income people that are in our city.

And one of my questions, or my only question that I am concerned about.

I know you all are federally funded.

Has there been changes to you being able to serve migrants, um immigrants, newcomers, um, and what um are those challenges and how are we continuing to build trust in a time where people are just um feeling like their existence is illegal.

Well, uh, in the application that we we are currently funded for, uh which we submitted uh back on April 1st of 25, it was kicked back to us with uh uh a strong recommendation that uh any and all references to DEI work be sanitized from the application, uh and so uh we did that.

We took the words out, however, um in the Head Start Act, you know, one of one of the requirements is to provide uh culturally and linguistically appropriate programming, and and so that is broad enough that you know we made the decision that it's not gonna change who we are.

We're going to do continue to do everything that we have done historically for 30 years, uh, without changing, and yet still get uh our application funded.

So uh uh but no.

Uh we there have been other recent development about speculating on uh place of origin, birth birthplace, and and uh to now uh up until now there have been no changes in in our regulations.

There's no been no changes in our practice.

We are continuing to serve children, and the owner requirement is age, uh income, and residents, and to us residents mean our service area, not the United States.

We are funded with a defined service area, city and county of Denver.

We don't serve children at Lakewood or Adams County, only Denver.

And so our children to leave in Denver, they need to be uh three zero to five if we're doing uh early Head Start, and they need to be income eligible.

That's that's our only criteria, and so uh we're in constant uh communication with the Office of Head Start while they're working, and uh we've received no other requests or or nor demands.

We've got a great partnership with our regional office as programs around the country struggled early in the year to receive their grant funds.

Uh they were some programs had funding held.

We never experienced a problem, never.

All of our draws have been timely.

Um the only change that was made was we needed to provide additional justification, and that is not just us, that's programs across the country.

And so because the the five the department of finance does our our fiscal draws, we have everything that they would need to to provide the justification for our draw.

So we are pretty solid.

Great.

Um thank you so much.

So grateful for your leadership in this very challenging time and grateful for the work that you all are doing.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember I'll be there.

Councilmember Gonzalez Gutierrez.

Um thank you so much for the information and for you all lifting up the great work.

Um, I'm curious if you have any statistics on housing status for the children and families that you serve.

And you may have heard this, but we have seen um, you know, even in the recent few years a huge increase in families that are homeless, and they are living on the streets.

Um we have hundreds of families right now, and I'm just curious what you all are seeing with the families that you are working with, knowing that you know um the types of services that you're providing or conversations that you might be having with families, what you are seeing on your end.

Uh I'll start and you can finish.

So we've we've we've uh a couple of our delegate agencies have a substantial homeless population and homelessness, according to the McCain and Bento Act definition, uh, is a categorical eligibility factor for Head Start.

Uh and so I know uh our one of our delegates, Catholic charities, uh, they serve approximately 18% of their enrollment.

Uh for our program and their own program, uh, are homeless families.

Um I would just say that uh we have an amazing family services director, and um she's constantly working with other city organizations to bring those resources to the staff first, and then also reaching out to those families.

Um I do think that we see a lot of um how um unhoused families that are living on somebody's couch, it's not permanent for them.

Um, one thing that the Office of Head Start has done is allowed us to use a housing calculator now as well, so that we're able to help make families eligible if they're paying way high cost rents and things like that, but absolutely we see a lot of this.

Uh we do a lot of training and professional support for the staff to be able to work with these families.

Is there anything that you see would be needed, like in addition to what you all are providing that you could see like partnership with anyone else, or what is the highest?

I mean, outside of needing housing, right?

Like, are there barriers that you think folks are facing in order to access?

There's just not enough affordable housing, is what I would say.

Um, we have set with other programs across the nation, and I believe it was Connecticut, has a partnership with um the housing development that they save spaces for Head Start children, and um Mary, our family services director and I have really thought it hard and long about that on what we can do here in Denver to get something like that going.

Thank you for that.

Thank you so much, Councilmember.

Councilmember Parody.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Um, this is I don't know that I've since I've been on council, had a presentation from Head Start.

So I'm really appreciative of this.

Um my mom worked for Head Start in my hometown for a while, so or family.

Um, no, it was it really was a big deal where I come from.

Um, so I am curious to understand a little bit more.

Like we're trying to understand all these different funding streams, and I'm seeing in the budget book and probably maybe it was on a slide two that you all um serve about um like 1,300 kids, and then DPP is serving about 4,000, I guess, four-year olds, um, and another couple hundred three-year-olds.

So that does seem like between those two things, like we're capturing um that that feels like um more of the numbers I would expect to Councilman Flynn's point where we'd be capturing like most um, you know, low-income kids in the city or kids who need the supporter would qualify.

Um, what are the hours of these head start programs?

Hours, hours, yeah.

Sorry.

It varies all of our programs uh are uh our full day, some have extended day.

So in in the head start definition, a full day is uh more than six hours, and the predominant uh uh time is eight hours in our program.

Uh uh one delegate or two delegates provide extended day and that's up to 10 hours.

Okay, um that's great.

I because part of what is um complicated to figure out both honestly as a parent, and then also when we're looking at how we cover what people need to be able to work basically for their families, is the interplay between like kind of school hours and then the like you know, 4 pm to 6 pm or whatever that might be.

Um do you know to what extent families that are in head start, whether um any of them also I don't know if you would know this, but take advantage of CCAP for the time for the after school time.

Some do yes, you know, uh we have and I'm sure they do for some.

And that covers really the the extended day.

So so uh one thing about the we're constantly reminded from the office of Head Start is that the funding philosophy is is the head start dollar is the last dollar in.

However, some of these other streams have that same concept, they're the less dollar.

So everybody wants to be the less dollar end.

Sure.

In which case braiding the the funds as a very complex matter, and and every all of our programs break funding from CCAP from UPK DPP, uh, to cover the cost of care.

And right now, in our city, there's not a standard uh cost of care uh number, a figure that and I know we're we're looking at that uh because everybody's organizational structure is different.

Their overhead, their facilities, their staffing, their training, all of that is different.

So it's one thing that you know uh we've we've been talking about it within the Office of Children's Affairs.

Uh there's a couple of uh uh citywide organization uh groups actually that I think uh would be uh prime uh to do uh a study and and trying to, you know, trying to find what are the real costs for care and see.

But we know that uh we don't cover it all.

And you have to remember in AR most of the programs, even uh when I came to the city, we probably had half of our programs providing three and a half hours a day.

We're part day programs, even though the emphasis in 78 was for full day full year.

They never provided the money to provide full day full year.

And so we gradually have have come to the point where now we are full day, full year within the the 14.4 million dollars, thanks to programs like DPP and UPK and CCAP and the breeding of all that uh so I would just add that I think um we do anticipate that our programs will be hit hard with the CCAP freeze.

Um our friends at DPP have invited us to the table with Dr.

Cisneros for the Harvard fellowship, and so that we're starting to have that conversation.

Um again, Mary McNill and I have sat with um Dr.

Cisneros and we'll be looking at a data sharing contract so that we can start looking at that a little bit.

We're just gonna ask if you all are gonna be party to the data sharing agreement, which is CPP for that a very exciting thing.

Yeah, and I know that um DHS had been we had talked to them way back about this the CCAP freeze coming and their desire to get everybody more aligned too.

So I'm sure they've also been um a force behind all this.

Um what kind of within this early childhood like funding space, um, what kinds of uh like what sort of umbrella table or group or you know, what's the meeting, you know, like where you have where you all get together.

Um how much does that happen?

I know that sounds like a silly question, but between all the um all the funders, um, I know you all have relationships with each other and you talk, but is there a um any kind of umbrella that brings you together, you know?

You know, I would say right now it's the Office of Children's Affairs getting the um DECA, thank you, team together.

Um, there's also the Denver Early Childhood Council.

Yeah, I was wondering what they're doing.

And so most of these are these these organizations have uh dual membership.

Uh-huh.

But I think the the the one that our office is spearheading that Denver Early Childhood Alliance, right, has got all of those stakeholders that uh that need to be at the table.

Yeah.

And I think that that would be the perfect group to really talk about uh defining uh the true cost of care.

Yeah, which is ambitious and hard.

And it's a moving target.

All right, thank you.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Parity.

Uh I'm I'm curious, is the Denver early um school that the organization you just spoke to.

Um say the name again.

The Denver Early Childhood Council, are they looking at a regional um approach or impacts, or is it um, I mean, do they have access to um regional solutions?

And the reason I asked that question is that even though your funding um for both programs are Denver specific, um obviously um the need um knows no boundaries, and there are folks moving from Denver to Adams to from Jeff CO to and so forth.

I'm curious as to how how is that communication being shared on a regional approach?

Well, there are other early childhood councils in the suburban areas.

Each area has their own.

At one point in time there was a lot of conversation between them because need doesn't stop just because it's the city limit.

Yeah, you know, and families move in and out of Denver uh pretty regularly.

And so I know the communication, and again, I've not uh not worked directly with uh early childhood council uh recently, but I know that's something that uh they've talked about in the past.

Because these are metro issues, not just Denver issues.

Well, I I think I I'm certain there are several of us on council we're gonna be reaching out to to validate.

We're looking at some of these absolute impacts, especially when it comes to um early childhood care and um education from federal cuts.

We're looking at the regional solutions as well as the direct impacts in Denver because the regional solutions will slow down the kind of uh year to year.

So even if we solve something in Denver for 2025, 2026, if regionally we still have migration and changes and impacts to them and they're not solving, then those same issues come back to us.

So very interesting and and knowledge filled uh both presentations, very helpful to families.

Um, so great that this is on Channel 8, that families that have access can just really uh view this on their at their leisure.

And so I'm really wanted to thank you, um, Dr.

Martinez and um Lori Medina for providing this really great important information, and we definitely will have you back on at the Health and Safety Committee for uh another presentation.

Seeing no other questions, um, one item is on consent that hasn't been drawn off.

And with that, uh meeting is adjourned.

Thanks, everyone.

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