Oklahoma Child Care Services, the program out of the Department of Human Services that licenses child care programs, issued a formal notification of change in procedures for child care entities that collaborate with public schools or head start programs. Effective immediately, all programs that choose to count the collaborative classrooms in licensing capacity numbers must now comply with all licensing minimal standards.  These include staff requirements such as background checks and training requirements, teacher-student ratios, and physical space requirements. Programs can choose to opt out of these requirements, but will no longer be able to use the collaboration toward licensed capacity. This means if the program “opts out”, they will not be able to count the collaboration Teacher as the site’s Master Teacher, will not be able to count the classroom space into square footage allowed and any other requirements they have previously used to meet licensing or STARS requirements. Children enrolled on the subsidy system will no longer be counted twice from different funding streams. This is a step in the right direction toward the goal of consistent and coordinated guidelines across all early care and learning settings.

Click here to see the formal letter from Oklahoma Child Care Services