The Early Childhood Iowa (“Agency”) initiative has a long and rich history of investing in young children and their families. In 1998, the Iowa legislature created Iowa Community Empowerment, known today as ECI and governed by Iowa Code 256I. The Agency provides comprehensive systems coordination to support healthy growth and development of children, families, and communities via complex and strategic actions that deliberately incorporate roles and responsibilities of all citizens. This effort is guided by the ECI statewide strategic plan to move closer to ensuring the Agency’s vision that “Every child, beginning at birth, will be healthy and successful.”
The Agency is partnering with the Iowa Department of Human Services to support child care centers, preschools, and child development homes (in-home child care) providers to streamline and automate child care business practices with managing operations including, but not limited to:
- Child and family information
- Marketing and enrollment
- Parent communication
- Scheduling and attendance
- Billing and invoicing
- Staff implementation and human resource feature
- Lesson planning
- Meal planning
- Reporting features with interoperability with state administrative data systems.
The Agency is seeking two vendors that specialize in child care management system software. The two selected vendors would need to demonstrate and provide functionality for an API to connect to Iowa’s Kinder Track data system via a real-time connection for the vendor system to push attendance data for one child for one period at a time (see Appendix 7 for a flow chart of this process, as envisioned by the Agency). The vendors selected will also need to meet the specific requirements as detailed in Sections 4.3 and 4.4 of this RFP.
