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Q&A
Council Member Stevens discusses early childhood education contract issues with Gregory Brender
4:40:18
·
130 sec
Council Member Stevens engages in a Q&A session with Gregory Brender about the challenges faced by early childhood education providers in receiving timely payments and navigating contract processes with the Department of Education.
- Brender highlights issues at every step of the process, including late contract registration and problems with the pre-kid system.
- He mentions that even after contract registration, providers face difficulties in getting paid due to various issues and lack of staff to resolve them.
- Brender notes a particular increase in problems at the beginning of the current administration due to staff exodus in the Division of Early Childhood Education.
Althea Stevens
4:40:18
Greg, I just had a quick question around you because I know you represent the day care council and DOE is separate from it.
4:40:23
Could you talk a little bit about some of the delays that they're also experiencing because I know that that's also been a huge part of the conversation and for me it's also really frustrating because separate so that means it has its own entities where it's like we should really be thinking about how do we streamline all these processes opposed to having all these different agencies.
4:40:42
So could you talk a little bit about some of the issues you guys have been having on that that front just because I just want to have it on record
Gregory Brender
4:40:48
as Absolutely, yeah.
4:40:49
There's kind of issues at every step of the process.
4:40:52
As with all human services, there have been issues with late contract registration, but after registration there continue to be issues.
4:40:59
As you know, contracts don't go through passport, they go through the pre kid system with the division of early childhood education.
4:41:09
There have been problems with if there is a question or any issue with the submission of either attendance, enrollment data, or if say a previous month's fiscal data has some issue, it can hold up payments for months.
4:41:26
And we need people to be we need organizations to be able to do things like submit batched invoices and also just have people to like call if something is getting flagged, like they can't confirm attendance, they can't confirm expenses because that may mean you go months where you're submitting your invoices but you're not getting paid.
4:41:46
So we've seen providers even after contract registration unable to get paid because there's some issue that can't be resolved with the operations analysts working within the division of early childhood education.
4:42:01
And we saw a particular huge sort of flare up of this particularly at the beginning of the current administration when there was a mass exodus of staff within the division of early childhood.
4:42:14
So the people who were actually processing these contracts weren't working there anymore and you had just fewer operations analysts, fewer policy folks within the division able to handle these.