Child Care Centers and Preschools
Rhode Island has developed BrightStars, a voluntary quality rating and improvement system (QRIS), to help child care providers in Rhode Island learn about best practices in early learning and apply them to the care children receive.
QRIS exist in many states across the country and are a proven strategy to systematically improve the quality of child care and early learning programs.
BrightStars assesses child care centers and preschools across 9 quality standards and 22 quality critieria, and one or more unnanouced site visits are conducted. Following the assessment, BrightStars works with child care programs to further implement best practices related to quality.
BrightStars assesses program quality in the following six quality domains:
- Child’s Daily Experience
- Teaching and Learning
- Staff-Child Ratio and Group Size
- Family Communication and Involvement
- Staff Qualifications
- Program Management