This fall, as children and parents across the Delaware Valley prepare for the start of the school year, Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC) will empower early childhood education providers with the tools to continually improve services to children and families. PHMC is the newly designated Southeast Regional Key (SERK) for the Pennsylvania Early Learning Keys to Quality program, a statewide effort dedicated to the quality improvement of early learning providers.
Through its role as the Southeast Regional Key, PHMC works with more than 1,400 early childhood education providers in Philadelphia, Delaware and Montgomery counties. PHMC has a long history of working with children and families through programs such as ChildLink, the City of Philadelphia’s Out-of-School Time (OST) and PHMC’s affiliate Resources for Children’s Health. The addition of the SERK initiative expands PHMC’s range of services to include early learning development.
The core function of the Southeast Regional Key is to assist early childhood education practitioners to improve the quality of their programs through application of the Keystone STARS standards. The Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare created the Keystone STARS scale as a means of improving, supporting and recognizing the continuous quality improvement efforts of early learning programs in Pennsylvania. The scale ranges from STARS Level 1 to STARS Level 4, with Level 4 representing the top level of quality. PHMC staff will evaluate early learning programs to assess their quality levels based on the Keystone STARS standards.
For more information on this transition, please contact Amy Friedlander at amyf@phmc.org or 215-985-2512. For more information on the Southeast Regional Key program, please visit www.seregionalkey.org.
