Office of Head Start FY26 Focus Area 2: Comprehensive Services Review Information Session

Office of Head Start FY26 Focus Area 2: Comprehensive Services Review Information Session

Glenna Davis: Hello everyone and welcome to the Office of Head Start FY26 Focus Area 2: Comprehensive Services Review Information Session. It is now my pleasure to welcome Tamara White to unmute herself. She's a member of our Head Start Oversight team. Tamara, the floor is yours.

Tamara White: Thank you Glenna, I really appreciate that. Greetings to everyone. We are glad that you are here with us today to learn more about the FY26 FA2 Comprehensive Services Review. Now, this session builds on what we shared during the FY26 Monitoring Kickoff webinar and for those who attended the FA1 information session.

Now, as we shared during the kickoff webinar and again in that FA1 information session, FA2 focuses less on systems and more on how services are delivered in practice. Now the review looks across program operations to understand how services come together to support children and families. You will see several content areas represented here.

Program design, management and improvement, and FA2 focuses on program design and strategic planning, as well as staffing and staff supports, with an emphasis on how those elements show up in your day-to-day service delivery, education and child development services, looks at effective teaching practices and how programs support children's learning and development in the classrooms.

Furthermore, family and community engagement services. This focuses on how programs support family wellbeing and meaningful family engagement. Health services. This covers a range of areas which include safe and sanitary environments, child health and oral health, mental health and social emotional well-being, nutrition and services for expectant families.

You will also see eligibility, recruitment, selection, enrollment and attendance, which looks at how eligibility, selection and enrollment requirements are implemented in practice. Finally, fiscal infrastructure focuses on budget development, implementation, oversight and the financial management systems that support program operations.

Today we're going to walk through these areas at a high level. We're going to highlight what has remained consistent throughout. We're also going to flag where there may be updates for FY26. The goal here is to help you understand the scope of the FA2 review and how it fits within the monitoring approach that you already heard about. Here you'll see is a copy of the FY26 FA2 monitoring protocol.

It looks very similar to the structure of the FY26 FA1 protocol, which we saw a few days ago. Now you can find this document on our HeadStart.gov site. This protocol focuses on the implementation of high-quality services. Now you may notice that we are back to the six content areas that we had in FA2 in past years, as opposed to the four that we saw in FY26 FA1.

The intent of this protocol is the same to support grant recipients to be prepared for their review through transparency and clarity. It explains how the review team will gather information from kick off with leadership team to looking at fiscal controls and observing classrooms. With all of this information, I'm excited. I'm now going to pass it over to Randi, who's going to get us started on the very first program area. Randi, over to you.
Randi Hopper: Thanks, Tamara. Hi, everyone. What you're seeing here are the monitoring review guides. This is a resource that programs can use to help you understand the key topic areas, and how the review team will assess them. This snapshot is from the Program Design, Management and Improvement, or PDMI section.

We wanted to share it with you so you can get a sense of how the information is laid out and how it supports preparation. These guides are meant to bring clarity, not surprises. They outline what reviewers will look at and give programs a straightforward way to understand the focus of each area. We'll walk through the content of these guides throughout this webinar, and please take time to review them offline.

First we're going to get started with our PDMI which has two sections program design and strategic planning which you see here and staffing and staff member supports. These topics may be familiar since they are the topics that were included in FY25 FA2 reviews, such as self-assessment and ongoing monitoring. Some PDMI topics are a bit different and we will highlight those on the next slide.

You'll also see that the guide does not list the standards. This isn't intended to cause stress. The Office of Head Start (OHS) has strived to simplify the monitoring protocol and the supporting resources. You'll see they use plain language and are streamlined. The goal is to succinctly and clearly focus on what is important for monitoring, and why those areas contribute to grant recipient success. Let's take a closer look at this first topic area. That's program design and strategic planning.

This is how the grant recipient uses data to inform program evaluation, planning, and improvement. This topic includes self-assessment and ongoing monitoring. We're looking at how grant recipients use that program data, that self-assessment and ongoing monitoring data to monitor program performance, evaluate progress toward goals, and continuously improve their program.

For our second topic, we're going to look at staffing and staff member supports. You may again notice some topics that are familiar to FY25 like management structure and supervision. Some of the PDMI topics will be different than prior fiscal years. Previously, teacher and home visitor qualifications, professional development and coaching fell under education and child development, referred to as ECD, and family services staff qualifications fell under family and community engagement, referred to as FCE.

Those topics have been shifted to fall under PDMI to connect all of those processes under one area for the program. Even though these are grouped under PDMI, the methodology for assessing compliance will remain exactly the same. Grant recipients will not need to adjust their approach to how you share with review teams about how you track and ensure that staff are qualified for their positions.

If we take a closer look at staffing and staff member supports, this is how the grant recipient recruits and retains a team of qualified staff members and provides effective supervision for staff members. This includes the management structure. That's how grant recipients’ leadership team provides effective management and oversight for every service area. Ongoing supervision. How the grant recipient regularly supervises staff members performance and provides feedback to support their continuous improvement. Staff qualifications.

This how you're demonstrating that center-based Early Head Start teachers, center-based Head Start preschool lead teachers, home visitors, and family services staff members possess the appropriate qualifications for their roles. During your FA2 planning, call, the assigned review lead that you speak to will provide that tracking form for your program to document staff qualifications for all the relevant staff member positions.

We're also going to take a look at professional development and coaching. This is how the grant recipient provides comprehensive training and professional development, and a coordinated, research based coaching strategy to enhance education staff members ability to deliver high quality services. What we'll see in FA2 PDMI is that there are three types of monitoring activities that occur. This is the management team kickoff, data tours and discussions.

The management team kickoff starts each review event as an opportunity for the review team to connect with leadership and management teams and get an introduction to the grant recipient. Data tours allow for managers to share how they track and use data related to program design, human resources, supervision, and ongoing monitoring across content areas, and discussions allow for education staff and family services staff to share about supervision and oversight.

What you're going to find is in your monitoring review guide, is designed to help you understand what is expected of those monitoring activities. Grant recipients should plan to have their leadership and management team members join the management team kick off meeting. This could be the director, fiscal officer and service area managers. This is an opportunity for the review team to learn more about the grant recipients' management team and the organizational structure.

The grant recipients should share and describe the organizational chart to really support the review team to learn more about the program during this kickoff. Here in the middle block of the slide, you can see that multiple data tours are included for PDMI topics. Each data tour is conducted with a service area manager such as the ECD manager or the health manager. This is to maximize the time with each of those data tour participants.

Each data tour consists of questions that relate to various topics that are relevant to that individual. For example, the human resources (HR) data tour includes questions from PDMI and from fiscal, which will be asked of the same participants at the same time during the review event. The review team will also meet with the education staff and family services staff members to learn more about PDMI topics such as supervision and oversight.

For the education staff discussion, the participating education staff members should be those teachers who have had their classrooms observed as part of the classroom exploration. Home visitors should be there and have their socialization observed or participated in interview as part of the socialization exploration. All of these activities will focus on PDMI key topics we discussed earlier. But for right now we're going to move on, and I'm going to pass it over to Courtney who's going to discuss our next program area.
Courtney Rajwani: Thank you, Randi. Good afternoon everyone or good morning if it is still good morning for you. I'm glad to be here to walk you through the content of the fiscal infrastructure portion of the FA2 review this year. Glenna has graciously been dropping the links to our monitoring review guides and to the protocol and to the slides for the session into the chat.

Those resources are available to you and we are going to walk through the information in the fiscal infrastructure portion of the review now. Let's get going. There are five key topics within the fiscal infrastructure portion of the FA2 review. The first area we want to highlight in this content area is budget development and implementation. In this section, OHS really wants to learn about the process that is used to develop your program's budget, including who is involved and what information is considered and used to inform those decisions about budget.

OHS is also going to ask for information about how your program tracks actual spending over the course of the year, and how your spending aligns to the planned budget. If there's information that if there's spending that is different from the planned budget, you'll also be asked to share about how you use your comparison of actual to planned spending in order to manage any variances between those plans versus the actual costs.

Let's go into our second area. The second fiscal topic that we will be highlighting is comprehensive financial management structure and systems. This area is really looking at your programs, systems and processes to support efficient and accurate fiscal functions, fiscal activities and all documentation. There's three areas that the team will be looking at under this umbrella topic.

This will include the system of financial record keeping to ensure that accurate documentation takes place for Head Start program income, expenses, spending, and all assets. The team will also look at your programs payroll system to ensure that personnel records for all staff charged to the Head Start grant are appropriately documented, approved, and allocated. Then finally, in this area there will also be a review of how the financial management system supports you as the grant recipient to fulfill all reporting requirements.

This includes the accurate and timely submission of your annual audit, your annual SF-425 report, and your annual SF-429A report. Let's take a look at our third topic, which is fiscal internal controls. These are policies, practices, and systems that your program puts in place to maintain effective control over all funds, property and assets in order to safeguard Head Start funds and prevent fraud, waste and abuse.

Here reviewers will be asking for information about your program's, policies and procedures, which are documented descriptions of how your key fiscal processes are carried out. This will include explanations of which tasks are carried out, by which staff members, what steps are taken, and how program leaders oversee and approve all fiscal processes. Reviewers will also ask about the program's standards of conduct for officers and employees, how conflicts of interest are identified and addressed, and the program's whistleblower protection policy.

Next, we'll be looking at payment management system drawdowns. We'll be asking about your program's process for conducting drawdowns from the PMS, from the payment management system, and how your program ensures that it minimizes the amount of time between receiving federal funds and using those funds to pay for Head Start program expenses. Another area of internal controls that we will be reviewing is account reconciliation.

You'll be asked to show how your program verifies all account activity and keeps accurate records through ongoing bank account reconciliations. You will be asked to provide at least one, perhaps more, recent bank reconciliations for review. Finally, we will be looking at your program's process for ongoing monitoring. Here you'll be asked to demonstrate how you have processes in place to monitor your program's fiscal operations and systems, and how your program implements corrective actions, as needed, to address any audit findings or other concerns.

The next topic in the review is allowable costs. Under allowable costs, we will be digging deeper into how grant recipients are spending Head Start funds to benefit the children and families enrolled in the program, and how you, as the grant recipient, comply with all requirements for the use of federal funds, specifically grant recipients that have multiple sources of funding will need to share your cost allocation plan.

The cost allocation plan shows how shared costs are identified and allocated to each funding source. You'll also be asked to demonstrate how that cost allocation plan is implemented, based on a sample of payroll and payment transactions. The purpose of this is to ensure that shared costs that are charged to the Head Start award are fair and reasonable. The review team will also look at your program's procurement process to understand the policies and procedures for this process, and how they are carried out.

Procurement procedures must be transparent, consistent, and encourage competition to provide assurance that the Head Start program is paying fair value for goods and services. We will also review indirect costs. Your program will be asked to share the methodology for charging and tracking indirect costs for the Head Start grant and to demonstrate how the grant recipient ensures that you do not exceed the approved indirect cost rate.

Similarly, we'll also review administrative costs. How are recipients charging administrative costs while ensuring that you do not exceed the administrative cost limit or any amount that is established through an approved waiver? Finally, under this topic, we'll also be looking at nonfederal match. There we will be looking at how grant recipients value and track nonfederal match to ensure that you meet the 20% match requirement.

We have one last big topic under the fiscal infrastructure section of the review, and that is facilities and equipment management. Specifically for facilities, we will be looking for information about facilities where federal interest may exist. For those facilities, grant recipients will be asked to demonstrate that they have obtained prior approval for any renovations, construction or purchases of facilities with federal funds.

Grant recipients will also be asked to show that they have filed and posted the Notice of Federal Interest. For all recipients, we will be taking a look at the grant recipients processes for purchasing equipment, maintaining equipment inventory, and disposing of equipment in alignment with federal requirements. Finally, the FA2 also checks to make sure that grant recipients maintain insurance coverage for all locations.

There's a lot to cover in fiscal infrastructure, and one of the ways we are asking grant recipients to support us in covering all of these topics. We will be requesting some fiscal information prior to the review. As you will see in the 45-day notification letter that is sent to you, there will be instructions in there to request a couple of areas of documentation to be submitted before the beginning of the review.

We'll ask for this documentation to be uploaded to the Head Start Enterprise System (HSES) 14 days in advance of the review. These are documents that are integral to the review, and sometimes they can be a little bit difficult to identify and find and locate right at the beginning of the review. We are asking that you kindly provide this to us in advance so that we can have a timely and efficient review process. We thank you for your partnership in getting the review off to a smooth start by providing this advanced documentation.

Specifically, you'll be asked to upload your program's most recent audit, any subrecipient or delegate contracts, your fiscal policies and procedures, your detailed general ledger from the most recently completed program year, and last but not least, your program's most recent annual SF-425 and 429A submissions. OK. Now let's talk about what you can expect during the review.

The fiscal content area will be measured through the fiscal data tour activity as well as transaction testing. In the fiscal data tour, you'll be asked to share the data, reports, and tools that you use to support your day-to-day oversight of the program's financial management systems and fiscal operations. Please be ready to show real-time data and documents during this process, and we'll go over what you can expect in terms of the data and documentation to provide in just a moment.

In transaction testing, the review team is going to select and request a sample of your actual transactions so that they can understand how you actually implement your policies and procedures and ensure adequate and accurate record keeping. Let's dive a little bit deeper into the details of these two activities. First during the fiscal data tour, the fiscal reviewer and the review lead will speak to your program's CFO and the program's Head Start director.

This time will be used to understand fiscal processes, policies, systems, and more, including how the fiscal staff collaborate with program staff. Here on the screen, and again, this is in the slide deck, as well as in that monitoring review guide for the Fiscal Infrastructure section, you'll find a list of all of the different data that the monitoring team is going to ask you to share. Then let's move on to transaction testing.

Following the fiscal data tour, the fiscal reviewer will select a series of transactions to test various aspects aligned with the topics that we have been discussing today. The fiscal reviewer will use your general ledger to make these selections. Then they will share the chosen transactions with the recipient's fiscal staff and review those transactions over the course of the review to ensure alignment with federal regulations, alignment with your program's policies and procedures, accuracy, and completeness of the documentation. That brings us to a close for fiscal, for now. Now, I would like to pass it over to Jessie to take us through the health content area.
Jessie Francis: Thank you, Courtney, so much. We're going to take a closer look at health. Again, those monitoring review guides are available for you in the chat. The protocol is available on HeadStart.gov. We're going to walk through much of that material together now. Within the health content area, many of the first set of topics we're going to talk about are around safety and those are also included in an FA1 review.

However, during your FA2 review, we want your programs to be able to be prepared to share about key things that keep children safe. We want to first talk about emergency preparedness. This will include how staff members are trained and how they're aware of any emergency plans, practices or policies, and how those should be implemented. We also want to hear from you about how staff are safe to work with children.

We want to hear about background checks. Those will be assessed during the FA2, much like they have been in previous years, as well as in the FA1. We want you to share your process for your program to complete background checks within all required time frames. During your FA2 planning call, your assigned review lead will provide to you a tracking form that you will complete to document the dates and how background checks have been completed for all of your staff members.

Continuing on with safety, we will focus on a topic of daily and ongoing safety checks. We'll discuss this with you during the Health Data tour, as well as look for evidence of these practices during our classroom and center observations. During this time, review teams will be looking for and listening for your process to report incidents that affect children's health and safety and that those are reported to the Office of Head Start within seven calendar days.

We want to hear how you ensure that all classroom and center environments, indoor and outdoor equipment and materials are clean and safe, how you ensure your facilities are free from pests, free from mold, pollutants and any other safety hazards, as well as your general approach for preventative maintenance of all facilities that serve Head Start and Early Head Start children.

We want to understand how you ensure your programs are licensed as is required by your state, your local or your Tribal regulations. We want to understand how you ensure children are not exposed to lead in water or in paint in any Head Start facility. This will include sharing your plans to prevent exposure as well as any completed testing. During our observations, review teams will look to see how safety and hygiene practices are implemented in all learning environments. We want to watch for and see hygienic toothbrushing practices.

We want to know that you are ensuring safe sleeping environments for Early Head Start children. We'd love to see how your staff demonstrate awareness about children's food allergies and ensure that no food with known allergens are served. We want to see active supervision and strong supervision practices in action that keep children safe and ensure that children are supervised at all times.

During the health data tour, shifting gears to a new topic, child health and oral health status, we want to focus on how your program follows a process to ensure children and families are connected to medical and oral health care. We want to understand from your program how you track and have established a tracking system to ensure this occurs, as well as a process to support families to become connected and to become up to date on their preventative and primary medical and oral health care within 90 days of a child's enrollment.

This year, during the FA2, we will focus on your tracking system to ensure that you have set up a practice to sustainably meet the requirements. Around mental health and social emotional wellbeing, reviewers want to hear how your program provides mental health services to children, family and staff members that address mental health needs and promote healthy and continued social and emotional development.

A primary focus this year in the FA2 will be on how your program implements mental health consultation. Reviewers will listen for how mental health consultation is structured, who is providing those services, and how the grant recipient assesses those services to understand if mental health consultation is meeting the needs of children and families on an annual basis. Nutrition, which is so important to children's healthy development and it's a cornerstone of Head Start programing.

When we talk about nutrition during your FA2 review, we want to hear how your program has structured nutrition services to provide meals and snacks that emphasize healthy foods and healthy habits, as well as how you're meeting the individual nutrition needs of the children that are enrolled in your program, including infants, toddlers, and any child who may have allergens or other nutritional needs.

Lastly, in health, for the programs that are funded to serve expectant families is a program option. We will monitor the services that you're providing to those families, so you should be prepared to demonstrate how you ensure that all enrolled expectant families are connected to healthcare and health insurance coverage within 30 days of their enrollment. Reviewers will monitor the tracking system for the services provided to expectant families, as well as look for how you refer expected families to others when necessary.

That was a lot, and as I walked through it, I did mention that there are two main parts of monitoring the health area in the FA2. The health data tour is the primary data tour where we will work with your managers to learn more about the types of policies, practices, procedures that you have put in place at your program that ensure a healthy and safe environment for all kids, and ongoing healthy development for children. Explorations are the observational component.

We will visit centers and classrooms to observe how staff are implementing safety practices in all learning environments, both indoor and outdoor. This is also in your monitoring review guide, but we want to flash on the screen a little bit more information that will help you prepare for the review. You'll see within the HR data tour, that is where we will discuss your criminal record checks and background checks for staff.

Again, during the planning call, your assigned review lead will provide you the form in order to help you prepare for that section of the review. Then during the health data tour, we would like your health services managers, facilities manager or whomever is appropriate at your program who can speak to the types of data displayed on that first bucket on the screen.

We'll want to see your health data tracking system, data related to mental health consultation, examples of safety plans and procedures or training plans, how you do your ongoing health monitoring nutrition data, and if you have it, any data related to reporting child health and safety incidents. For center and classroom explorations, there is no need to prepare any data for those review components. We will come out and visit your centers and your classrooms and observe what your great staff do every day. That is all for health. I'm going to pass it over to Randi for Education and Child Development (ECD).

Randi: Hello again everybody, and on to ECD. For FA2, ECD has one section and that is the effective teaching practices, which focuses on the grant recipient and how they promote children's learning. You can see on our slide that's upcoming that we're going to be taking a look at how children are learning through those responsive, developmentally appropriate teaching and home visiting practices that really meet children's needs.

This takes a closer look at several topics. The first one being ongoing child assessment. This is where you'll walk through how ongoing child assessment data is collected and really used to individualize for children and inform practices that support children's learning and progression toward their goals. The next topic is responsive teaching practices, and to assess this, the review teams are going to conduct observations of classrooms to see these practices in action and really discuss with grant recipients how they support teaching staff to provide high quality learning environments and experiences for children.

This is going to include how education staff members use teaching practices that foster trust and emotional security, develop children's communication and language skills during experiences, manage their classrooms in a way that really supports children's engagement and social emotional development, and provide developmentally appropriate schedules that enable children to have various experiences throughout the day.

The same methodology used in prior fiscal years will be used to conduct these observations. Grant recipients will not need to prepare anything in advance of these observations or discussions with the review team. Just like Jessie said about the center explorations and not needing to prepare beforehand, the same goes for these classroom observations. The next thing that we're going to look at is responsive home visiting practices.

These are included for programs that offer home-based services. To assess these the review team is going to conduct observations of socializations. Those are if they're scheduled to occur during the monitoring event and they'll also discuss with the grant recipient how they support home visiting staff to then support families as their children’s first and most important teachers. This includes showing how the grant recipient offers families the opportunity to help plan group socializations that are developmentally appropriate and align with the curriculum.

It also provides how families have the opportunity for meaningful, shared experiences to develop parenting skills during group socializations. Just like classroom explorations, the same methodology used in prior fiscal years to conduct socialization observations is going to remain the same and the same with that staff member discussion. You don't have to prepare anything in advance of these observations or discussions with the review team as well.

For ECD, there are three types of monitoring activities that occur. This is a data tour, discussion and explorations. The data tours allow for the ECD managers to share how they track and use data related to ongoing child assessment, supervision and continuous improvement for ECD services. Discussions allow for education staff members to share how they collect and use data to individualize for children, how they tailor their teaching practices to be responsive to the needs of children, and the supervision and resources they receive to support their work performance.

Classroom and socialization explorations allow for the implementation of center-based and home-based practices to be observed. In classroom explorations, those will occur. For grant recipients who provide center-based services as part of their grants, review teams will visit a sample of classrooms, and the review lead will discuss with the director during the FA2 planning call that sample process.

Now the socialization explorations will occur if you provide home-based services as part of your grants, like I mentioned before. But as a note, socialization observations are only going to occur if a socialization is actually scheduled to occur during the review event. If no socialization is scheduled, then the review team will conduct a separate interview with home visitors to learn more about socialization planning, and family engagement and the opportunities that they provide to families.

As we take a closer look at this, you're going to see that on the left here. We've got our ECD data tour, and this is where grant recipients should really plan to have their ECD manager join this conversation. This is an opportunity for that ECD manager to discuss policies, procedures and processes related to ongoing child assessment, supervision of staff and how they support the implementation of responsive teaching and home visiting practices.

Like other data tours, additional questions from other topics will be asked of the participants as they're relevant. Such as the ECD Data tour includes an opportunity for the ECD manager to discuss their systems around ongoing monitoring for continuous improvement, as they're related to ECD services. That's an example of how a PDMI topic is also included and asked of the ECD manager.

For ECD staff discussions, the grant recipients should really play in to have education staff members participate who have had their classrooms observed as part of that classroom exploration, as well as home visitors who have had their socialization observed or participated in that interview-based conversation as part of that socialization exploration. These participants, those staff members will have the opportunity to discuss how they collect and use ongoing child assessment data to individualize for children and support children's healthy development.

Classroom explorations and socialization explorations, those are observations conducted by the review team. Like we said before, you don't have to prepare for those anything in advance. We're going to come out to you. We're going to take a look. We just want to see how things are happening. With that being said, I'm actually going to pass it back to Courtney to help us go through the FCE.
Courtney: Hey, Randi. Again, we're happy to share all of the resources, including all of the monitoring review guides, so that you can review those and have another way to prepare for your upcoming review. Let's dive into FCE. This year, the FA2 will focus on a couple of different topics within FCE. First, welcoming environments. We want to hear about how families are helped to feel valued, respected and welcomed to engage in the program.

Specifically, the review team will explore how the program communicates with families and how the program offers families opportunities to provide feedback. We'll also talk about how the program learns about family needs and strengths, particularly how your program designs and implements intake and assessment procedures to learn about and understand how to prioritize each family's needs and build on their strengths.

Additional topics within Family and Community Engagement (FCE) include family partnership goals. This includes how the program works with families to develop family partnership goals, track achievement and progress towards those goals, and adjust goals over time. Lastly, we'll look at engagement for male caregivers, how programs encourage and engage fathers and male caregivers to participate in their children's learning and development.

In FY26, FCE will be monitored through two types of activities. First, an FCE data tour and then several discussions. The FCE data tour will be held with the FCE manager to learn about strategies and tools that support family engagement. There will also be two separate discussions, one with parents and another with family services staff, to learn about how the grant recipient works with and engages families.

Let's take a little bit of a deeper look into those two monitoring activities. To dig in deeper, you will see that the FCE data tour is a meeting with the FCE manager or the person in your program who is responsible for overseeing FCE services. This data tour is designed to review the data that the program uses for ongoing monitoring of FCE services, which includes data focusing on family goals, tracking systems, and intake and assessment procedures. The FCE data tour will also look at staff member oversight and the supports that are offered to frontline staff. Then, as we mentioned, we have those two discussions. First, the parent discussion focuses on the parent and caregiver experiences with the program.

Families and caregivers will be invited to discuss how families are made to feel welcomed and incorporated across the program, environment and activities, how families are given opportunities to have back and forth communications about their child's learning and experiences with the program, how the grant recipient partners with families to create family goals that are based on family needs and interests, and how grant recipients offer fathers and other male caregivers opportunities to be a part of the program offerings and an active participant in their child's learning and development.

Then let's discuss briefly the discussion with Family Services staff. In these discussions, we will be asking Family Services staff about how the grant recipients’ intake and assessment procedures identify family strengths, needs and interests. We'll also discuss how the grant recipient staff members collaborate with families to develop goals that are based on specific family’s needs.

Then lastly, we'll be discussing how grant recipients track family partnership agreements and that process for families. We'll be asking for staff to show reviewers the specific tracking system with real time data that's used to monitor the family partnership agreement process. Now I'm going to be handing it back to Jessie to take us through ERSEA.
Jessie: ERSEA. Eligibility, recruitment, selection, enrollment and attendance. My personal favorite content area. In FY26, during the FA2, we will be focusing closely on the strength of your ERSEA systems and how your program has built these systems to enroll eligible children and families into the program. The good news is that ERSEA is assessed very similarly to last year's FA2, as well as pretty similar to FY26 FA1.

There shouldn't be too many surprises in this area for you all. Let's start with the S. We're going to start with selection. We would love for your program to walk us through how children are selected, and how that selection is based on data from your most recent community assessment. We want to hear about your selection criteria.

We would love to see it during the ERSEA data tour as well, and we would love to know how it is used to rank children and add children to a wait list. In terms of ERSEA training, we will ask your program to demonstrate how staff members, who determine eligibility, work in the ERSEA area are appropriately trained and ensure that only eligible children are enrolled in your program.

We know that ERSEA practices are tied to strong systems and have a role in preventing fraud. We'll ask your program to demonstrate how your various ERSEA systems deter fraudulent or erroneous enrollment, and you will be able to demonstrate this to us by sharing your systems and sharing example files. When it comes to eligibility, we want to understand how each program has set up your system for enrolling only eligible children and families.

We'll dig in to the process for managing eligible enrollees using the 10% and the 35% provisions of the Head Start Program Performance Standards if your program has opted to do so. At this point, we will also review a sample of child files in detail for the majority of programs and I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a moment. When it comes to enrollment, review teams will dig into how your program ensures you are meeting your funded enrollment, including your process to track and fill any vacancies that occur within 30 days.

We also want to know how you accurately report your monthly enrollment via HSES. Review teams will ask you to demonstrate how you maintain 10% of your actual enrollment with children who are eligible for services under IDEA or show us that you have an approved waiver and how you monitor that enrollment ongoing. Lastly, we want to talk about your ongoing monitoring of ERSEA services.

This is a topic that's come up across content areas. We want to understand how you use and track your ERSEA data to improve outcomes, improve services, and improve processes for your program. This is a chance for you to really show review teams some strength around continuous improvement. As I've mentioned, the ERSEA area has two primary monitoring activities. First, the ERSEA data tour. This will occur for all programs.

We'd love to sit down with your ERSEA manager to understand the data, reports and various processes you use in the ERSEA area. Then next the ERSEA eligibility file review. During this, we will test a series of your child files or your eligibility files for accuracy. Prior to your monitoring event, and your review lead will go over this with you on your planning call, you will be asked to provide a de-identified roster, and the team will draw a sample of files to take a close look at. The size of the sample is variable depending on your program enrollment size.

Then during the review, the review team will walk through each of those files with you for accurate documentation and eligibility. The file review, though, will not occur for Tribal recipients. Here are the types of data that your ERSEA manager and your team should be prepared to share in the ERSEA data tour. We'd love to see your tracking system, how you track enrollment vacancies, examples of training records for required eligibility training, policies, procedures, selection criteria, waitlist, attendance data, and sample child files.

Then, as I mentioned, for the eligibility file review, using that de-identified program roster, we will select a sample of child files to look at most closely. The review team will look at those with you during your FA2 event. Again, the file review will not be conducted for tribal programs. That was a whirlwind. Thanks for sticking with us. A deep breath as I pass it over to my friend, Tamara, to close us out for the day.
Tamara: Thank you, Jessie, and thank you to all the presenters. Great job. Now that we have walked through the FA2 content areas and how the tool is structured, we want to take a quick look at what comes next. This slide we find out what comes next. This slide represents where to find the FY26 monitoring resources and what communications that you can expect. HeadStart.gov is your primary source for official monitoring materials. I'll repeat that again. HeadStart.gov is your primary source for official monitoring materials.

Everything that you have seen today, the FY26 monitoring protocols page includes the updated FA1 and FA2 protocols, along with the CLASS review field guides, the AIAN CLASS self-review field guide, and Incident Reporting and RAN resources. These are the same materials reviewers use and are intended to support transparency and preparation. In terms of communication, grant recipients will receive or have received customized notification letters for the upcoming fiscal year back in July.

There was an information memorandum published in September. There's also the 45-day letter that notifies recipients that their review is imminent. Following that notifications, recipients will have a planning call with the review lead, during which the FA1 or FA2 monitoring review guide will be shared, and the review lead will share next steps during that discussion.

Again, the goal is to keep communication clear, timely, and predictable so that programs will feel supported throughout this process. Again, thank you to the presenters. Thank you all for spending time with us today. We truly appreciate your engagement. We most certainly appreciate the work that you do every day to support the children and families. We know monitoring can feel complex.

We know it can feel daunting. But our hope today is that this session helped to clarify what to expect for the FY26 process and where to find the resources and support available to you. If questions come up after today, please use the contact information and resources that we've shared. I know that our folks are continually putting things in the chat for you to access. We are here to support you as you move forward. We want you to be successful. Thank you again and we appreciate all that you do.