The news is out, Washington state is one of the winners of the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC). What does it mean, you ask? Washington state, along with California, Minnesota, Ohio, North Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island will share $500 million dollars to go towards early learning initiatives. That’s a cool $60 million dollars over the next four years for Washington 
state!
Straight from the Washington state Department of Early Learning, Washington will use the support from the RTT-ELC for several key purposes:
- Expanding the Washington Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (WaKIDS), our state’s kindergarten readiness assessment, to include all incoming kindergarteners by school year 2014-15.
- Taking to scale our state’s quality rating and improvement system (QRIS), which helps early learning programs improve the quality of care and education they provide to young children and provides information on quality to families.
- Enhancing the state professional development system by offering awards and incentives to those who work with and care for young children.
As we’ve mentioned many times before, early learning is an extremely important aspect of education. Countless studies continue to show the positive relationship between high quality early learning and closing the achievement gap.
“This incredible opportunity means that the more than 73,000 children who start kindergarten in Washington each year will hit the ground running,” said Department of Early Learning Director Bette Hyde. “We were bold and ambitious in writing our application, and we will be equally ambitious as we use these funds to build the early learning system our children deserve.”
For more information on Washington state’s RTT-ELC application head over to the Washington state Department of Early Learning website.
