Office of Head Start FY26 Focus Area 1: Program Systems Review Information Session

Office of Head Start FY26 Focus Area 1: Program Systems Review Information Session

Glenna Davis: Hello and welcome everyone to the Office of Head Start FY26 Focus Area 1 Program Systems Review Information Session. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Faith Scheibe, a member of the Head Start Oversight team. Faith, the floor is yours.

Faith Scheibe: Thank you Glenna. We are really glad that you are all here with us today to learn more about the FY26 FA1 Program Systems Review. Our goal of this session is simple. We want you to walk away feeling more confident and better prepared for what this review looks like and how the tool is structured.

Before we walk through the content, I do want to briefly acknowledge that the FA1 tool has been adjusted for FY26. You may have heard about this during the kickoff, but we want to reinforce it here. Much of what you see should feel familiar. We're not reinventing the wheel.

Instead, we've made targeted updates based on feedback to reduce burden and better align monitoring with where programs are in their grant cycle, while still maintaining program integrity. With that context, let's take a look at the topics covered in the FA1 review.

The FA1 review focuses on the key program systems that support effective program delivery and contribute to safe, high-quality services for children and families. There are four main content areas that are included in this review. First is program design, management and improvement, or PDMI.

This content area looks at how programs design their services to align with community need, how governance bodies provide oversight, and how program staff their services and support staff members. Next is fiscal infrastructure. This area focuses on budget development, implementation and oversight.

It also looks at the financial management systems and structures that support fiscal operations as well as facilities and equipment management systems. The third area is eligibility, recruitment, selection, enrollment and attendance, or ERSEA. This content area examines the systems and structures programs used to determine eligibility and carry out recruitment, selection, and enrollment processes.

Lastly, you will see a newer content area called supporting safe and healthy learning environments or SSHLE. This area brings together key elements related to education and child development and safe and sanitary learning environments and it looks at how programs maintain safe and healthy settings across the program for all children.

Throughout today's webinar, we will break down these areas and help you understand what reviewers are looking for and how the pieces fit together so you feel prepared heading into an FA1 review. What you're seeing here is the FY26 FA1 monitoring protocol. One resource that you can use to help prepare for your review.

This protocol lays out the key program systems that Office of Head Start (OHS) will assess during an FA1, such as the PDMI, Child Health and Safety, Fiscal and ERSEA. It also explains how the review team will gather information from conversations with governing body and policy council members, to looking at fiscal controls and observing classrooms. You can see exactly what areas will be reviewed and how the process will unfold. Let's dive into the review guides that will help you prepare for your review.

Jessie Francis: We're going to dive through a little deeper through each of these monitoring review guides to help you understand the content that is included in each of the four content areas of the FA1 that Faith just walked us through. What you're seeing on the screen now is a snapshot from the program design, management and improvement, or PDMI section of the protocol and the monitoring review guides.

This will give you a sense of how the information is laid out, so you can support your teams to prepare for your FA1 review. We'll walk through each one of these guides relevant for the FA1 through this webinar, and you can take some additional time to review it offline. Starting with program design, management and improvement, this content area has three sections. First of all, program design and strategic planning, which you'll see on the screen here.

Program governance and staffing and staff member supports. I hope these topics sound a bit familiar to you. They are the same topics that we assessed in last year's FA1 review. One of the major differences, though, is that review teams will be with you on site, talking to staff and reviewing data.

You'll notice that the guides don't list the standards. This is not intended to create stress. OHS is really striving to simplify resources and to streamline these documents to support your preparation. The goal is to succinctly and clearly focus on what is important in the monitoring review and why those areas contribute to all your success as grant recipients.

We really want to be with you on site to see how you do your best work. Let's take a closer look at the first PDMI topic on the screen here, program design and strategic planning. We want to hear how your program uses data to inform program design, planning and improvement. That's going to include your self-assessment as well as your ongoing internal monitoring as well as your community assessment.

How do all of these data sources and these practices support your program to remain responsive to community need and carry out strong services? The next PDMI topic is program governance. Again, there is not a lot new in FY26 in terms of what we are covering in the program governance section of the FA1.

It's going to be very familiar and similar to years past. We want to hear from you as well as hear from your programs, governing bodies and policy councils, how they support the program with their expertise, with their experience and how they ensure oversight that allows your program to provide quality services for children and families.

Review teams will be listening for a few specific things. We want to hear about your governing body membership. Do you have the right folks on your governing body? Is your program training your governing body members to support the program and to use their expertise? We want to understand the types of data you share with the governing body and how the governing body uses those data to inform their oversight responsibilities.

It's very similar. We want similar information in our discussions with the Policy Council. What is the composition of the Policy Council? How is your program supporting the Policy Council members through training, through providing data, and then how do the Policy Council members engage in setting directions for the program to drive quality services?

Our third PDMI topic is staffing and staff member supports. We will be covering the management structure of your program, how the grant recipients' program and leadership team provide effective management and oversight for all the service areas and all the services you provide.

We also want to hear how your program regularly supervises staff members performance, how they provide feedback to support staff members to continuously improve in their roles, and finally, staff qualifications. We will ask your program to demonstrate that your staff are qualified.

We'll take a close look at center-based early Head Start teachers, center-based Head Start preschool lead teachers, home visitors and family service staff members to ensure that they have the appropriate qualifications for the role. On your FA1 planning call, your review lead will provide specific tracking forms as well as instructions to complete these forms related to staff qualifications.

For the FA1 PDMI, we're going to be monitoring that content area through three main types of monitoring activities. There will be a management team kickoff. This is the first activity during your FA1 review. This is the time when the review team will meet the program's leadership and management team to get to know each other, have introductions, and go over the process for the review week.

Next up, there will be a series of data tours. Data tours allow for managers to share how they track and use data related to their service areas, human resources, ongoing monitoring, and more. During data tours, we'll spend time sitting with your program managers to best understand how you oversee services.

Then the final component for the PDMI content area is discussions. This will allow us to talk directly with governing body and policy council members, as well as with education staff members. We'll take a closer look at these a little bit more. You're monitoring review guide is designed to help you understand what to expect from each of these activities.

You will see outlined the various participants in these activities, as well as some helpful hints as what you should bring to meetings or the data you should be prepared to show. For example, the management team kickoff, as I said, will cover the first day of the review. It will be that introduction to your director, to your service area managers and to your fiscal officer.

To this meeting, we suggest you bring your organizational chart and community assessment data so that you're ready to speak to those during the event. During data tours these will be focused on specific topics. You will be asked to bring human resources related material to the human resources data tour. All of this is outlined in your monitoring review guide.

Then lastly, those three discussions that I mentioned previously, governing body discussion, policy council discussion, and your education staff discussion. In the education staff discussion, we do want to speak to those folks that we had a chance to observe during classroom explorations or during a socialization exploration, and we'll talk a little bit more about that when we get into the SSHLE content area. That was a bit of a whirlwind on PDMI. I'm going to pass it over to Courtney who will begin to walk us through fiscal.

Courtney Rajwani: Good afternoon everyone. I am excited to get into fiscal. Let's go. Glenna has been sharing the monitoring review guides as we've gotten to each section. You'll see that fiscal monitoring review guide is being shared in the chat. This is a resource that you can use to help you understand all of the key topic areas in the FA1 review and how the review team is going to assess each topic.

This snapshot you see on the screen now is from the fiscal infrastructure section. We hope that these guides bring you clarity and ensure that the review has no surprises for you. These guides will outline what reviewers are going to look at and give you a straightforward way to understand the focus of each area. Let's dive in.

The key components of the FA1 fiscal review include, first, we have budget development implementation and oversight. We will want to hear about how you develop your program’s budget including who is engaged in the process. From there we will ask recipients to demonstrate how you track your budgets and then your actual costs.

How do you use that process of tracking actual costs and comparing it to the budget to identify any variances, to determine if you need to submit a budget modification request, and to manage your budget throughout your fiscal year. The next piece is the Comprehensive Financial Management Structure and Systems.

This section will focus on grant recipient’s systems for maintaining financial records, reports, and all fiscal data related to your federal Head Start awards. Through this topic, we'll be taking a deep dive into the financial management system, exploring how the system is used to manage fiscal processes, documentation, etc. We'll be also looking at payroll records. We'll be asking fiscal staff to demonstrate the ways that payroll records are used to accurately charge all personnel costs to your Head Start award or awards.

Of particular note, it's important to know that the fiscal reviewers will be selecting transactions to test, including a number of payroll transactions to ensure accuracy in payroll records. Then lastly, under this umbrella topic we'll be asking fiscal staff to demonstrate their financial record keeping through real examples.

Let's move on to our next topic. The next area that we'll be taking a deep dive into within fiscal infrastructure is internal controls. We'll be asking about internal controls throughout the entire FA1 fiscal review. These are mechanisms, rules, and procedures that your organization is implementing to ensure the integrity of financial and accounting information, promoting accountability within your fiscal processes, and preventing fraud.

These include things like policies and procedures, processes that you may be documenting, and organizational structures that work together to provide reasonable assurance regarding financial reporting, your internal operational efficiency, and compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.

Internal controls are procedures that you design to safeguard assets, minimize error, and ensure that operations are conducted in an approved manner. During the review, we will particularly ask recipients to demonstrate these things through number one, fiscal officer qualifications, ensuring that the fiscal officer's education and experience are sufficient to provide effective fiscal oversight policies and procedures.

We will be asking your team to provide policies and procedures to the review team, including in advance of the review. We'll share more information on that in a moment and you'll see that within your 45-day notification letter. We'll also be looking at payment management systems drawdowns to ensure that PMS drawdowns are managed in an approved way that aligns to all guidance.

We will also be looking at grant recipient reconciliations. How do programs reconcile your various accounts with a particular emphasis on bank account reconciliation? That will also be one of the components of transaction testing that we will look at. Then finally ongoing monitoring. How do programs monitor their own operations and financial management systems to ensure oversight of the Head Start award?

We have two more topics to go under fiscal infrastructure. Our next topic for the FA1 is allowable costs. Of course, we all know that costs charged to your federal awards must be reasonable and allowable. We'll be asking the grant recipient to share your processes to ensure allowability and will also be asking to review some transactions around these items to test for allowability.

If applicable, we will be focusing on the cost allocation plan to ensure that all programs are allocating costs appropriately, particularly if there are shared expenses. We will be asking for examples and transactions to help test that your approved cost allocation plan is appropriately implemented.

We'll also ask about procurement. You will be able to walk us through your procurement process and fiscal reviewers may also request to test a couple of specific procurements as part of that transaction testing process. Lastly, we have facilities and equipment management. This is going to be a brief topic for the FA1.

We'll ask about insurance and how grant recipients ensure that you all have adequate insurance to cover potential risks of Head Start operations. OK, I did mention that there was some information that the review team will be requesting prior to the review beginning. In order to support getting all of this information collected in the fiscal area, we are requesting some fiscal information up front.

There will be instructions in the 45-day letter that you receive with a request for some documentation to be added to HSES 14 days in advance of the review, and your review team will cover this with you as well during a call that you will have with them prior to the review. These documents are integral to the review and sometimes we do find that grant recipients are not able to produce them right at the beginning of the review.

Given that reviews are short and there's a lot of information we are working to collect, we do ask for your kind support in providing this information prior to the review. That will include the most recent program audit, any subrecipient or delegate contracts that you have, your current fiscal policies and procedures, and the detailed general ledger from your most recently completed program year.

Then during the review, we also want to clarify and ensure that you're aware of the monitoring activities that are included in the fiscal infrastructure portion of the review. There are two primary data collection methodologies that we use. The first is the fiscal data tour. Through this part, through this on-site data tour, the review team is going to ask you to share the data, the reports and the tools that you use to support your day-to-day oversight of your fiscal processes. Examples of real time data and documentation will be requested throughout that fiscal data tour.

Additionally, the review team will also request to review some of your actual transactions to understand how you implement your policies and procedures. This will be a component where the reviewer will let you know which transactions they need to review in a more in-depth way and they'll reach out to you to let you know what information they need and then they may also reach out to your fiscal team for any questions or clarifications.

In FY26 one of the updates for the FA1 is that there will be a specialist fiscal reviewer onsite during the FA1 and the intention for this is to take a deep look at fiscal systems and flag any feedback early in your award cycle to ensure that you're set up for success during that five-year project period. OK. Let's take just a little bit of a deeper dive into those two fiscal activities I mentioned.

The fiscal data tour the fiscal reviewer and the review lead will lead this fiscal data tour. They'll be speaking with your CFO, or equivalent, based on your organizational structure as well as your program's Head Start director. During that fiscal data tour, we will be working to understand fiscal processes, policies, systems and more, including how the fiscal staff collaborate with program staff.

Below on the screen, you can see all of the different types of data that the monitoring team will ask you to share during that data tour. Again, you will have these slides. They are in the chat so you don't need to memorize these right at this moment there in that monitoring review guide as well. Then as I shared a little bit more information on transaction testing.

Following that fiscal data tour, the fiscal reviewer will select a series of transactions to test various aspects aligned with the topics that we have talked about today. The fiscal reviewer is going to use your general ledger to make these selections. They'll let you know which transactions have been chosen, and then they will review those transactions and detailed documentation that you'll provide to them over the course of the review to ensure alignment with federal regulations. With that, Jessie, I think I'm handing it back to you to take us through SSHLE.

Jessie Francis: Thanks so much, Courtney. Switching gears from fiscal to supporting safe and healthy learning environments. We call this "shell", SSHLE. This is a content area for the FY26 FA1 review that is focused on the learning environment and the fact that learning environments are safe and supportive of education and child development.

The SSHLE content area has components of health, safety and education, the topics covered in the FA1 SSHLE content area are consistent with review activities that have happened in previous FA1 reviews and FA2 monitoring events as well. We want programs to be ready to share their plans, practices and policies to ensure that all environments are safe and sanitary and conducive to children's learning and healthy development.

The first topic in the SSHLE content area are safe and sanitary environments. We want you all to be prepared to show us and share your program's emergency preparedness plans, how staff members are trained and aware of your emergency preparedness practices, and how these should be implemented.

We're going to also ask you to be prepared to share information around your program's background check processes. We'll have you walk us through your processes for background checks and how you ensure those are done within the required time frames. You'll also share background checks for individual employees.

We'll ask you to complete a tracking document that will be provided by your review lead during your FA1 planning call. On that call, we'll walk you through the document and help you be prepared to complete this. Then during the Human Resources Data tour, when we are onsite, we will do a deep dive and walk through that process with you.

The next topics in the SSHLE content area are related to you ensuring program environments are safe through daily and ongoing safety checks. Review teams will be looking for a process to report incidents that may affect children's health and safety to the Office of Head Start within seven calendar days.

We'll want to hear how you ensure indoor and outdoor equipment and materials are clean and safe, how you keep facilities free from pests, mold, pollutants and other safety hazards, as well as your general approach to ensuring preventive maintenance and upkeep of all facilities where children are served.

While we're onsite, we will review for current licensure to ensure those meet state, local or Tribal regulations as applicable to your program and we'll ask you to walk us through how you ensure children are not exposed to lead in water or lead in paint in all facilities where children are served.

During our observations, review teams will also be looking for those safety and hygiene practices that keep children safe and healthy. We'll be looking for hygienic toothbrushing practices, how you ensure safe sleeping environments for Early Head Start children, how staff members implement ensuring children's food allergies are accommodated, and the types of active supervision practices that you implement in classrooms to ensure children are supervised at all times.

In terms of education and child development, review teams will collect data through explorations primarily. We will observe teaching practices in action in your classrooms, and that may also prompt additional discussions with program staff members during our education staff discussions.

This includes watching for and hearing your practices around teaching practices that foster trust and emotional security, develop teaching practices that develop children's communication through language rich environments, and develop their language skills, how programs are managing classroom environments that support children's engagement and social emotional development, and how this is all done through developmentally appropriate classroom schedules.

This last topic is only applicable for our grant recipients that are funded to serve home based option. When you are funded to serve that, we will look to see how your program is also doing this for that option. We'll want to see a responsive service including home visits and socializations.

We'll want to hear from you and see if possible, the ways in which families are provided opportunities to plan group socializations that are developmentally appropriate and aligned with your program's selected curricula, as well as how families are provided meaningful opportunities to have shared experiences during socializations and develop their parenting skills.

That was a lot. Let's look a little bit more closely at how these are included through the various monitoring activities. In the SSHLE content area, there will be data tours. One of those data tours will be the Safe and Healthy Learning Environments data tour where you will provide detailed information around how you keep learning environments safe.

As I mentioned, we will have discussions with education staff members to hear from them directly, how they do their job, and there will be explorations. We will complete center and classroom explorations for our center-based programs and where possible, socialization explorations for those of you funded to serve home based.

Again, a little more information about which activities and which data you might find helpful to be prepared to share during these various review activities. The Human Resources Data Tour will focus on the criminal record check process. Again, your review lead will go over those details with you during the planning call.

The Safe and Healthy Learning Environments Data tour will focus on those safety pieces will ask you to talk us through your safety plans and procedures, your procedures for reporting child health and safety incidents, training and ongoing monitoring for health and safety. That ed staff discussion we are not asking you to prepare any data or for those staff members to bring data to those discussions.

We really want to focus on hearing how they do their work and hearing how their work is connected to the observations that we had the pleasure of conducting. Then, of course, the three types of explorations we will observe classrooms, centers and socializations if one is scheduled during the review event. That is our SSHLE content area in a nutshell. Courtney, over to you for our last content area in the FA1.

Courtney Rajwani: It's ERSEA time. We have one more monitoring review guide to share which is for ERSEA, eligibility, recruitment selection enrollment and attendance. We have five topics that we will be exploring under that ERSEA umbrella during this year's FA1. We'll be focusing closely on your ERSEA systems, how you're setting yourselves up for success in building and implementing those systems. Let's start with selection.

First, we'll be asking about your selection criteria, how children and families are selected for participation based on your most recent community assessment. We'll be asking about how this selection criteria is grounded in your assessment, and then how you use that selection criteria to rank children on a wait list.

We'll also be exploring eligibility training that you provide to your staff. We would like to ask you to demonstrate how staff who determine eligibility or work in the ERSEA area are appropriately trained to ensure that only eligible children are enrolled into the program. Next, we'll be digging deeply into eligibility.

We want to understand how each program has set up your system for enrolling only eligible children and families. We'll be digging into the process for managing eligible enrollees using the 10% and 35% provisions of the regulation. To support us in understanding this we will also review a sample of child files in detail. Our next topic under ERSEA is enrollment.

We will be exploring how you ensure full enrollment across all program options, including the enrollment of children with disabilities. We'll also explore how recipients ensure that you are meeting funded enrollment, including your process for tracking and filling vacancies within 30 days. We'll also explore accurate reporting of monthly enrollment via the Head Start Enterprise System (HSES), and you'll be asked to demonstrate how you maintain 10% of actual enrollment with children eligible for services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), or to show that you have an approved waiver or on track to meet that percentage.

We'll also explore with you the ways in which you partner with your local education agencies or LEAs to meet the enrollment requirements of the regulations. Finally, we will talk with you about fraud prevention. We know that ERSEA practices are tied to strong systems and preventing enrollment fraud and we know that all programs are working to prevent any erroneous enrollment of children or families who are not eligible.

We'll be asking for you to demonstrate how your ERSEA systems deter fraudulent or erroneous enrollment. Let's take a look at the monitoring activities that are included in this area to address those different topics. Our review of the FA1 ERSEA content area is going to feel like the ERSEA section of the FA2. If you've had that review in the past, it will consist of an ERSEA data tour and an ERSEA eligibility file review.

The ERSEA data tour is a time for the ERSEA manager to share data, reports and processes related to selecting and enrolling families and documenting how families meet the program eligibility requirements. Then the eligibility file review will follow that data tour and will test a series of ERSEA eligibility files for accuracy.

Prior to the monitoring event, each recipient is going to be asked to provide a de-identified file roster, and the review team will draw a sample from that roster. The size of that sample is going to be variable depending on your program’s enrollment. This process will be communicated to you in further detail in your 45-day notification letter.

During the review, the review team will review each sampled file to ensure accurate documentation and accurately determined eligibility. Just a note, consistent with last year, the ERSEA eligibility file review activity is not conducted with Tribal programs. Let's just take a little bit of a deeper look at the participants and the types of data that you'll be asked to share during these activities.

During that ERSEA data tour, the review team will ask to speak to the ERSEA manager. Again, the purpose of that data tour is to understand ERSEA processes, policies, systems and more, including that information on staff trainings. OK. You can review that monitoring review guide and the information on this slide to be well prepared for the types of data and processes that you'll demonstrate during that data tour.

Then following the data tour, the review team is going to review that selected number of eligibility files with the ERSEA manager or another staff member who's familiar with the eligibility determination process to validate the accuracy of your program's ERSEA tracking, and to validate that only eligible children and families are being enrolled. Again, that eligibility file review component is not conducted with Tribal programs. Now, I would love to pass it over to Tamara from the OHS to share what's next.

Faith Scheibe: Well, Tamara had to step aside. I'm going to fill in. Thank you, Courtney and Jessie for all of that really helpful information. Now that we've walked through all of that FA1 content area and how the tool is structured, we want to take a quick look at what comes next. This slide highlights where to find FY26 monitoring resources and what communications you can expect.

HeadStart.gov is your primary source for official monitoring materials. The FY26 Monitoring Protocol page includes the updated FA1 and FA2 protocols. It also includes the class reviewed field guides and the Risk Assessment Notification (RAN) resources as well. You can also find the recording for the kickoff session that we held back in September.

These are the same materials that reviewers use and there the intention is to support transparency and preparation. In terms of communication, grant recipients will receive a customized 45-day notification letter informing you of the upcoming review event. There's also an information memorandum that was sent to all recipients that talked about what the monitoring approach was for FY26.

You can expect trainings and webinars such as this one. Go to HeadStart.gov, the federal monitoring page to get the most up to date information. Then after you receive a 45-day letter notification informing you of your review, you will receive a phone call or a notification from your review lead. That review lead will be scheduling a planning call with you to go over the review, prepare for it, to share the review guides that we went over today, and answer any and all questions. We want to make sure that that communication is clear and timely. But most of all, we want to make sure that you feel supported throughout the entire process.

With that, we just want to say thank you so much for attending our presentation today. We know that monitoring can feel really complex and it's our hope that today's session helped to clarify what to expect in the FA1 and where to find resources and to know that support is available for you. If any questions come up after today, you can use the contact information and the resources that we shared. Please reach out. We're here to support you as you move forward. Thank you again and we appreciate all that you do.