Office of Child Care and WRMA collaborate

Summary

In 2016, the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Child Care (OCC) needed a trusted partner to design, pilot, and implement a comprehensive monitoring process, including a custom web-based monitoring and reporting database, to determine and document state/territory compliance with Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) requirements. Due to WRMA’s demonstrated excellence as an existing OCC contractor, and decades of experience building and maintaining national data collection and reporting IT systems for health and human services programs, OCC selected WRMA to implement its vision for monitoring. Since then, OCC and WRMA have worked closely together to bring OCC’s monitoring vision to life.

Details

OCC administers the CCDF, working with state, territory, and tribal governments to provide low-income working families with access to affordable, high-quality early care and afterschool programs that fit their needs. OCC is responsible for CCDF program oversight and monitoring to ensure state/territory program compliance with CCDF regulations and with the approved triennial State/Territory CCDF Plans.

From 2016-18, WRMA assisted OCC in envisioning, creating, and piloting its three-phase monitoring system, building every tool, tipsheet, and training from scratch. Beginning in 2018, after updating the procedures and resources to reflect lessons learned from the pilot process, the OCC and WRMA team implemented formal monitoring with an initial cohort of 15 states. The collaboration proved so effective that OCC more than doubled the project’s staffing in 2018 and, in 2019, awarded WRMA a five-year contract to continue implementation and refinement of the monitoring process through the end of the next three-year monitoring cycle.

WRMA’s diverse, distributed team supports OCC by:

• Implementing and refining the monitoring and oversight system, data collection tool, process workflows, and documentation, including facilitating virtual and in-person stakeholder engagement to obtain input on the effectiveness of the monitoring system.
• Operating and maintaining the OCC Monitoring System (OCCMS), a fully custom web-based monitoring and reporting IT system that serves as the official system of record for OCC’s monitoring process.
• Developing and delivering live and on-demand training and technical assistance to state, territory, and federal staff and other stakeholders engaged in monitoring.
• Coordinating and delivering comprehensive program support, through:
  • Hands-on content and logistical assistance throughout all three phases of onsite and virtual monitoring, including evidence collection and preliminary compliance assessment.
  • Policy review, analysis, and recommendations.
  • Reporting and analysis of qualitative and quantitative state/territory monitoring data.

WRMA fosters productive, long-term working relationships by assigning each OCC Regional Office (RO) and the Central Office a dedicated monitoring liaison with field experience managing and/or monitoring state/local agencies or programs. Working hand-in-hand with their assigned ROs, these liaisons play a critical role supporting and managing state/territory-specific monitoring activities throughout the monitoring lifecycle.