Creating safer and healthier child care programs–free of harmful environmental hazards–is key to protecting the well-being of children.
Family child care educators can use the below resources to improve the quality of their programs AND protect children’s health by eliminating environmental hazards like lead.
The Lead-Safe Toolkit helps family child care providers identify and reduce lead hazards. Lead can be found in water, paint, soil, dust, and consumer products.
The FREE Toolkit offers a range of resources that provide easy-to-follow steps for determining if lead hazards exist within a child care facility and what to do to reduce exposures.
The Toolkit is available in English and Spanish.
Toolkit Contents:
In the four-part webinar series, child care providers will learn how to protect children and staff from lead hazards found in paint, water, soil, and consumer products. All videos are less than 30 minutes and highlight best practices and policies found within the Lead-Safe Toolkit.
Family child care providers can enroll in the Protecting Children’s Environmental Health e-course for FREE. Use this code, TrainEco22, to sign up today!
Providers who take the Protecting Children’s Environmental Health course get quick and practical tips for reducing children’s exposures to environmental hazards like lead in water, pesticides in food, and unsafe cleaning supplies within and around early care and learning facilities. The 3-hour e-course is approved for adult learning clock hours in all states and is available in English and Spanish.
The Getting Ahead of Lead Leaders Network was established to build leadership within the family child care field. The Network comprises racially and geographically diverse family child care providers committed to protecting children’s health from environmental hazards. Network members completed over eight hours of training in environmental health, including participating in an all-day session at the 2022 NAFCC conference in San Francisco. Getting Ahead of Lead Leaders will engage other child care providers and community members and provide training on best practices for identifying and eliminating environmental hazards in homes and child care settings.
Interested in becoming 2023-2024 Getting Ahead of Lead Leaders Network member contact kattar@cehn.org.
The National Center for Healthy Housing has developed a helpful webpage of financial resources that can assist with home repairs. The various links on the page can connect family child care providers to people and programs near them that will help investigate and fix lead and other environmental problems in homes.
With funding from The JPB Foundation, the National Association for Eco-Healthy Child Care® (a national program of the Children’s Environmental Health Network), and the National Center for Healthy Housing have partnered to help child care providers identify and eliminate lead in their homes.
This partnership has developed user-friendly and science-based resources for the child care field, including the Lead-Safe Toolkit and a four-part webinar series. A national network of family child care providers was also established–Getting Ahead of Lead Leaders Network–to bring the message of lead prevention to their communities.