Two local partnerships between daycare centers and their respective school district has been awarded a grant through Governor Kim Reynolds Continuum of Care program to support full-day care for children in preschool. The IKM-Manning Community School District with the Manning Child Care Center are intended to be awarded $100,000 and the Exira-EHK CSD and Kids in the Village were selected for $50,403 to strengthen a partnership between the two entities to allow for all-day care and more opportunities to get children ready for school. The grants will be utilized to expand the number of children served through hiring supportive staff, hours of operation and transportation needs. Reynolds says “Iowa has a strong and diverse statewide preschool system with many options for Iowa families. We’ve also had tremendous success improving child care access, growing the workforce, and increasing wages for child care workers. Still, Iowa’s working parents need more flexibility to provide their children with full-day care plus early learning, which has been a gap in our system for too long. The Continuum of Care grant program provides a strategic solution by incentivizing child care providers and preschool programs to work together to better serve Iowa families. There’s a clear need for this program — as evidenced by the overwhelming number of applicants — and I encourage state legislators to explore ways to permanently support these partnerships.” More than 120 applications were submitted with Reynolds and the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) selecting 19 to be awarded grants totaling $5 million. The complete list of recipients can be found included below.
