Here is a good article summarizing some of the benefits of good childcare.

It’s the education, stupid!

Of course, it’s easy for us to tell the current population of welfare recipients to just get a job and don’t live off the public dole. It’s not me who is going to benefit thirty years from now when that man is not in prison, who is a little boy in daycare today. It’s my children that benefit.

I, for one, want to live in a society that cares about education at all levels, and that includes childcare. I want to live in a society that puts more value on children than it does on nuclear missiles. That’s why, when my kids were preschool over 20 years ago, I sent them to Montessori schools, and the check for tuition that I had to write every month was one of my most rewarding bills to pay. I knew then that great early education was a sound investment for me and my children, and I know today that likewise, on a macro scale, excellent early education, which includes subsidized childcare, is an investment in the future of our country and society.

And the cycle continues.

Of course, this shows a reflection of our state’s values. Clearly, early childhood education is not valued as a public objective. Yet we don’t mind paying for incarceration. The cost of incarcerating criminals far exceeds the cost of teaching preschoolers and getting them ready for schools, giving them a chance at success. In the face of countless studies correlating education levels inversely with prison attendance, this seems like a very shortsighted approach to solving our problems.

There will be more hoods loitering in California inner city neighborhoods in the years to come. There will be more homelessness and poverty in the rural stretches of the central valley.

These are tough times, I agree, but less education, at all levels, is not going to make California more competitive in the decades to come.

There is an important window of opportunity. The Head Start Association does a nice job illustrating this for the Right Brain crowd in our world with this Window of Opportunity video.

According to the Center for Digital Government:

September 14, 2011

An American Recovery and Reinvestment Act project, the Child Care Time and Attendance application plugs the loopholes in the previous manual system and prevents child care fraud, eliminates overhead and manual calculation errors and improves the speed of payments to providers. Deployment approaches comprised an Internet-based application, hosting the application in a private, hybrid cloud, integration with major New York State human service applications, and the collaboration of 60 governmental organizations (three state agencies and 57 counties) as well as three private companies. Program savings from fraud prevention and detection are projected to be $34 million.

Controltec’s comments:

The three private companies mentioned by the award are Controltec, and its two subcontractors,  IBM and the Professional Development Program of the State University of New York, Albany. The Internet-based system is based on Controltec’s KinderTrack and KinderConnect systems, designed, developed and deployed by Controltec.  The Controltec support center is also providing call center services to all of New York’s child care providers, parents and county case management and payment workers. IBM is hosting the system in a primary data center in Jersey City, NJ with a backup system for fail-over in Atlanta, GA. SUNY provided the statewide training.

Controltec is proud to be a part of the CCTA team and is honored to have had a chance to contribute to a multi-year initiative to make a significant difference in New York, one of the largest states of the U.S.

Click the link below to read a press release about the award from New York’s Center for Digital Government:

Best of New York Awards

From left to right: Ron Sawyer (Controltec), Jose Perales (Controltec), Chris Vohs(Controltec), Sara McAlister (Controltec), Steve Wantz (Controltec), Kevin Smith (Controltec), Rob Hops (Controltec), Renee Rider (Assistant Commissioner), Norbert Haupt (Controltec), Karen Adams (OCFS), Kevin Leyden (IBM), Eileen Mahoney (OCFS), George Warner (OCFS), Rhonda Duffney (OCFS), Marianne Hashmann (OCFS), Naveena Sabbi (OCFS), David Chan (New York State)

CCTA is a combination of KinderTrack and KinderConnect, hosted in an IBM data center in Jersey City, right in the heart of the swath of destruction of Irene.

The New York project manager declared an emergency on Friday evening approximately midnight New York local, in preparation of the onslaught of the hurricane. Controltec sprung into action within less than 30 minutes and scheduled a test  switch-over to backup.

The switch-over test to the Atlanta backup data center took place on Saturday morning at 8:00am. The system came up on backup, all data was up-to-date and everything was live. Then we switched back to primary in New Jersey and watched.

The system stayed operational on the primary servers right through the hurricane.

Thanks to our partners at IBM. Job nicely done.

Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano announced an aggressive new initiative to reduce the incidence of day care fraud, waste and abuse. Conservative estimates from the New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) indicate that anywhere from 11% to 33% of expenditures on publically funded day care benefits are lost to fraud, waste and abuse due to the improper conduct of day care providers and recipients.

Controltec is proud to note that the Child Care Time and Attendance System (CCTA) referenced in the Nassau County article is KinderTrack.

Nassau County is one of two counties on Long Island in New York, just east of New York City, and one of the largest counties in New York, outside of New York City.