Each Child. Every Community.

The Smart Start Network works year-round to ensure children and families thrive, creating a brighter future for each child in every community. To celebrate the new year, Smart Start will showcase the impact of the Network with early care and education, family support, early literacy, health and nutrition, and with early childhood system support and building. To learn more about Smart Start, you can read Smart Start’s 2022-2023 Annual Report.  

Smart Start improves early learning practices and environments for children by offering professional development, technical assistance (TA), and other support to teachers and directors.

Smart Start is able to create an impact by:

1. Improving or maintaining child care center and home high quality, improving access to quality care and offering professional development and technical assistance.
   • 1,654 child care facilities or 28% of all North Carolina’s facilities received Smart Start TA to improve child care quality.
2. Establishing infrastructure support for critical early childhood implementation like NC Pre-K.
   • Local Partnerships collaborate with NC Pre-K providers and serve as co-chairs on local NC Pre-K Committees. 46 Partnerships administer the NC Pre-K program in 55 counties
3. Managing subsidy funds to boost quality and promote child care access for children.
   • Child care subsidies provide financial assistance to help children and families access early care and education.
   • Smart Start manages over $65 million in subsidy funds locally to boost early education effectiveness while increasing access for children who are most under-resourced. 
4. Increasing Compensation for Early Childhood Providers.
   • In 2022-2023, 4,534 child care teachers received an education-based salary supplement. Of these teachers, over 84% remained in their positions throughout the year!
5. Engaging Early Childhood Champions.
   • Partnership staff serve on county and state early childhood taskforces, support future teachers as early as high school, help open new facilities and homes, and create workforce pipelines to increase teacher recruitment!
6. Bringing together communities to support early education.
   • For example, Smart Start of Davie County shared information on how child care is impacting the workforce with the Davie Chamber of Commerce. After learning about the number of children on child care waitlists, one local business leader shared that they have realized the need to be more flexible with work schedules to accommodate employees who have child care issues!
7. Managing the Coaching for Technical Assistants Initiative to work with TA providers and early learning programs to implement best practices.
   • The Initiative expands coaching and professional supports for TAs in the Smart Start Network, providing coaching and consultation to providers towards implementation of healthy best practices in the early care and education setting. Learn more about this Initiative.

Each local partnership supports early care and education differently, meeting communities where they are to support early care and education in unique, innovative ways. Examples of early care and education impacts are below:

• The Catawba County Partnership for Children launched the R.A.I.S.E. (Recognizing And Investing in Supporting Early Educators) Task Force with community partners to develop creative ways to increase the number of early childhood teachers. R.A.I.S.E. created the Early Childhood Academy in collaboration with Alexander County Partnership for Children and Catawba Valley Community College, a 2-week, 32-hour opportunity for potential new teachers to obtain required trainings, plus background checks and fingerprinting, making them eligible for employment in a child care classroom. Participants receive training from local experts and connections to community resources and support networks.
• Children & Youth Partnership for Dare County forged a collaborative relationship with the local Community College to elevate educational standards of child care professionals. Participants receive application and enrollment support, scholarships, and incentives. Through this program, a family child care home provider enrolled and earned an A in a course and is now working on earning a 5-star license and an Early Childhood Certificate!

Read our 2022-2023 Annual Report to learn more about the impact Smart Start has had across the state in early care and education.