New DRS changes announced by Head Start

On Thursday, August 27, 2020, the Office of Head Start (OHS) announced they have updated a few rules to the Designation Renewal System (DRS).  The purpose of these changes is to ensure grantees are making improvements in areas that effect outcomes and lessen the bureaucracy and inefficiencies by grantees and the federal government.

According to a final ruling, “grantee performance before the effective date of the final rule is subject to the prior DRS conditions and grantee performance after the effective date is subject to the revised DRS conditions.”

According to the ECLKC website, the DRS “holds Head Start and Early Head Start agencies accountable for delivering high-quality and comprehensive services to the children and families they serve, and meeting program and financial requirements.”

What are the new DRS changes?

The three new key changes to the prior DRS rules are monitoring review deficiencies, CLASS^© thresholds, and Fiscal/Audit concerns.

OHS Director Deborah Bergeron said in a press release, “The revised DRS encourages Head Start agencies to focus on continuous quality improvement rather than just compliance, by supporting high-quality program operations including robust systems to support health and safety, financial, and human resource management.”

“This change helps ensure the most qualified grantee is providing services to each of our 850,000 Head Start children and their families,” Lynn Johnson, ACF Assistant Secretary, said.

According to the “Head Start Designation Renewal System (DRS) Final Rule Changes” webcast by OHS, roughly one-third of grants were required to compete under the prior rules. They estimate now that it will decrease to about one-fifth of grants.

1. Deficiency Condition

While the original deficiency condition required a grantee to have one deficiency in a monitoring review over the five-year grant period, it has been changed to require two or more deficiencies in any monitoring review.

By increasing the number of deficiencies from one to two, this change helps grantees lessen their “hyper-compliance” philosophy to creating systems to prevent problems and allow improvements when a single problem occurs without losing a qualified staff member. 

Here’s how can ChildPlus help with this change:

With ChildPlus, you have access to Monitoring tools to self-assess your agency in order to find and correct deficiencies prior to a real federal review. ChildPlus provides preloaded monitoring checklists, such as Focus Area One and Focus Area Two along with previous monitoring checklists used during reviews, as well as the ability to add custom self-monitoring checklists to the software.

These monitoring options allow agencies to centralize and streamline the self-monitoring process in a single software. Head Start and Early Head Start agencies can pick and choose the checklists they want to implement during their self-assessments and track all of the details including Corrective Action Plans pertaining to each deficiency found in each self-assessment. This way Head Start and Early Head Start agencies are equipped with the proper tools and will know how their agency would score in an actual review situation.

2. CLASS^© Condition

The new rule has established two sets of thresholds while removing the lowest 10 percent criteria.

• Quality Thresholds: These are the expectations for every Head Start and Early Head Start classroom.  If a grantee scores below these thresholds in one or more areas, OHS will provide support to the grantee in order to make improvements within the agency.

• Competitive Thresholds (formerly minimum thresholds): These are the “floor for quality in terms of teacher-child interactions”. If a grantee scores below these thresholds in one or more areas, OHS requires them to re-compete for funding. “These competitive thresholds increase the minimum standard of quality and set the expectation for programs to work toward moving into the high-quality range.”

Here’s how can ChildPlus help with this change:

Using ChildPlus means you can assess your own teacher-child interactions using the CLASS feature – the same way as the federal reviewers. ChildPlus has CLASS versions for Infant and Toddlers for Early Head Start programs and CLASS for Pre-K for Head Start programs. For each version of CLASS, grantees can set the observation periods and select the various thresholds or add their own thresholds to use in the agency for comparison. With this tool and the customizations available, grantees are empowered with the right reports to make data-driven decisions in order to keep improving child outcomes.

For Managers and Directors, ChildPlus has a Dashboard feature to see your CLASS^© domain averages for your entire agency or drill down to individual sites or classrooms. This Dashboard feature is even equipped with an email scheduler allowing agencies the ability to schedule custom Dashboards to be emailed to various staff members on a regular basis, like Directors, Executive Directors, Policy Council or Governing Board members, who don’t regularly log into ChildPlus. 

Fiscal Condition

There is now an additional criterion for the Fiscal Condition.  Previously, it was only one criterion which was if there was a going concern detected in an audit. This change helps OHS identify potential fiscal management concerns and mishaps.  The revised fiscal condition will require competition if:

1. Audit finding of going concern during grant period.
2. A total of two or more audit findings of material weakness or questioned cost associated with its Head Start funds in audit reports for a financial period within the current project period. 

According to the National Head Start Association’s press release, “this method increases the focus on the financial health of Head Start grantees to ensure more holistically that Head Start children are served by strong, reliable organizations.”

Here’s how can ChildPlus help with this change:

ChildPlus offers a couple ways to help with the Fiscal Condition change.  Grantees can:

• Use our Monitoring feature to create an Internal Audits Monitoring checklist to preform internal audits and track any findings and Corrective Action Plans.
• Create a custom Internal Audit module and the necessary reports for Internal Audits tracking with the Module Designer feature to review and inspect your fiscal processes.

With all of these ChildPlus features, agencies can effectively self-monitor their agency’s practices, find deficiencies or areas needing improvement in order to make changes before a federal review.

ChildPlus Software has already began working to implement the new CLASS^© thresholds in our software for Emotional Support, Classroom Organization, and Instructional Support. Users will be updated when the new thresholds are ready.

The new DRS conditions will become effective on October 27, 2020, sixty days after the official announcement. The AFC and OHS will hold another webcast Thursday, September 3^rd, 2020 to answering questions about the new changes.

For more information about these changes, visit the Office of Head Start’s official site.