Each of the four pilot projects involve Parent Aware and some form of scholarships or allowances to help families access quality early care and education programs. Each community has multiple early childhood interventions in place involving a number of community partners. The four communities include North Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Wayzata and Blue Earth and Nicollet counties.

MELF supports ten diverse projects across Minnesota designed to contribute to the body of knowledge about what works best, and most cost-effectively, in program operations and in the larger early childhood infrastructure. Many of the projects focus on serving a particular group such as English Language Learners, immigrants, children with special needs, or children in rural communities. 

Parent Aware is a pilot quality rating system that uses standardized, evidence-based measures to rate the quality early childhood education providers. Parent Aware is unique among quality rating systems with its clear focus on parents and a strong evaluation exploring the correlation between ratings and child outcomes.

MELF has developed a model for measuring the school readiness of children at various stages and across a variety of domains. We’ve identified a battery of reliable and valid measures for each of these domains, and created a shared database where assessment results from across are projects can be aggregated, shared and analyzed. We hope this measurement model and database will be used over time to evaluate other projects, both in Minnesota and nationwide.

By exploring how MELF-funded initiatives improve the ability of their communities to sustain quality early care and education programs, we hope to provide direction for Minnesota and other states to create early childhood systems that improve children’s school readiness and maximize resources. Our goal is a system that works for parents and children rather than dividing funding and service delivery systems into artificial silos.

This program is the pilot of the market-driven approach suggested by economists Art Rolnick and Rob Grunewald from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. Parent mentors make home visits to help families access community resources and choose the best early childhood education program for their child: at age 3, children receive a 2-year scholarship to pay for high quality early education services, the cost of which can be more than $13,000 annually.