Our state is going towards Stars being mandated eventually here too.
I thought I'd be getting out before it happened but not sure anymore. But they are doing it 1 small step at a time and looking back I'm thinking 'how have we not seen it'. They began by encouraging us to go for level 1(made it sound so easy and come on, who couldn't use the $ incentive they offered?), then it was level 2(still pretty reasonable and higher incentive, hell yeh, I can do that), if you reached the 3rd level, you were considered quality(hmmm, getting trickier, lots more time invested in all this but still, higher incentives, increased subsidy payment plus with the strong support people we had through our local resource agency it was doable) AND being 3rd level we were being recognized as professionals.
It must mean we take so much better care of our children, right??
Then things started changing. They took away 1 of our local support people and gave her a different job. Now I'm not even seeing 3rd level Stars being mentioned as "quality'; it's 4 and 5. PLUS our other loyal 'can't do this without her' support person's job ends the end of this year. We all just found out.
I emailed her this a.m., telling her how I felt and how sorry I was to hear that. Words can't begin to tell you how much help these 2 people have been to the providers in our region.
There doesn't seem to be any good local support left for us, it'll all be from the state level. And that has proven to be inadequate and confusing at best for the past couple of years.
I asked her if she could help me renew my STARS one more time. I will always provide quality child care, as long as I can do this job, but I will be doing it without Stars.
I'm just hoping parents aren't always duped into thinking STARS=quality.
Just my Monday a.m. vent.