Quality Counts for Kids is Hillsborough County's exciting continuous quality improvement program for all legally operating centers, family child care homes, and out-of-school time programs. The program offers many forms of support, resources and information to participating programs.

Quality Counts for Kids is a voluntary continuous improvement program that uses licensing standards as a foundation and sets a continuum of five clearly defined levels of increasing quality. This continuous quality improvement program is based on a point system in which a program receives points for every quality benchmark it achieves. The overall mission of the Quality Counts for Kids Program is to improve the quality of Hillsborough County's early care and educaton and school-age programs. The Quality Counts for Kids rating system will:

• Ensure young children throughout Hillsborough County are provided with the best possible early learning experiences through high quality early learning programs and school-age programs;
• Provide information and support to early learning programs to improve and sustain the quality of their programs; and
• Provide families with an easy to use tool to select the best programs for their children

Center based programs are awarded 'star level' designations based on the number of points a program receives for meeting quality specific standards. Center standards address:

• Curriculum and Instructional Assessment
• Family Engagement
• Learning Environment
• Program Administration
• Ratio and Group Size
• Screening and Identification of Special Needs
• Staff Qualifications

Family Child Care Homes are awarded 'star level' designations based on the number of points a family child care home receives for meeting quality specific standards. Family Child Care Homes standards address:

• Business Administration
• Curriculum and Instructional Assessment
• Family Engagement
• Learning Environment
• Provider Qualifications
• Screening and Identification of Special Needs
• Provider as Employer (may not be applicable)