Supporting Working Families:
ACF Roundtables on Improving Access to
High-Quality Child Care
Formative Data Collections for Program Support
0970 - 0351
Supporting Statement
Part A
August 2019
Submitted By:
Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation
Administration for Children and Families
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
4th Floor, Mary E. Switzer Building
330 C Street, SW
Washington, D.C. 20201
Project Officers:
Melissa Brodowski, Office of Early Childhood Development
A1. Necessity for the Data Collection
The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeks approval for data collection to help improve access to high-quality child care and inform the Administration and ACF priorities and program planning. Information collected will help inform program implementation and technical assistance for ACF child care and early care programs. ACF seeks information through 10 Regional Roundtable meetings with stakeholders that will help increase our understanding of what is needed to improve access to affordable, high-quality child care that meets the needs and preferences of families so they can work. The data collection will also be used to gather information about how states are using increased funding from their Child Care and Development Fund grant and identify innovative programmatic solutions to barriers faced by parents, providers, and employers from across the country.
Delivery of targeted assistance related to program implementation or the development or refinement of program and grantee processes;
Planning for provision of programmatic or evaluation-related training or technical assistance (T/TA).
Obtaining grantee or other stakeholder input on the development of program performance measures and program outcomes.
This request needs to be completed by November 2019.
There are no legal or administrative requirements that necessitate the collection. ACF is undertaking the collection at the discretion of the agency.
A2. Purpose of Survey and Data Collection Procedures
Overview of Purpose and Approach
ACF, the Office of Child Care, and the Office of Regional Operations will convene a series of invitation-only half-day roundtables/listening sessions in each of the 10 federal regions. These forums will include several panel presentations and small and large group discussions which include parents, providers, employers, state/local child care representatives, and innovators to discuss barriers to accessing and building affordable, high-quality child care and practical solutions. Consistent with the scope of the parent ICR as described in supporting statement A (“Formative Data Collections for ACF Program Support”), the information collected during these sessions will be limited to use by ACF in the development of future technical assistance, formation of research agendas, and/or strategic planning. The Office of Child Care at ACF plans to issue an accompanying Request for Information in September that will be available to collect additional information from a wider array of stakeholders.
Research Questions
Through large and small group discussions, we plan to delve deeper into the following overarching questions for attendees:
Parents: What do working families seek from child care to assure that they are able to work and their children are thriving?
Providers: How do we make care safe, healthy, and developmentally supportive while preserving choice? As businesses, what barriers do providers face in that pursuit?
Employers: What are employers interested in doing to leverage child care to address the worker shortage? What is their experience with child care and employing parents?
State/Local Child Care Officials: What are states/localities doing to increase access to affordable quality child care? What can be done to streamline the process and prevent the child care cliff?
A Roundtable Protocol is provided as Attachment A.
Study Design
This study will be a descriptive study with the primary goal of gathering data and information from several key target groups: parents, providers, employers, and state and local child care officials. The sample will be a purposive sample and ACF Regional Offices will identify potential participants and conduct outreach with stakeholders to ensure that the target groups will be represented in the Roundtable. The Regional Office will send invitations to participant by emails, letters, and will conduct follow-up calls.
Data will be collected using large group discussion and small group breakout sessions within a half-day in-person meeting in one location for each of the 10 ACF Regions. ACF will have facilitators lead the discussion using a semi-structured protocol. Participants will be informed that the large group discussions will be recorded for note-taking purposes only. Additional notetakers will capture the responses during the large and small group breakout sessions. A contractor will review the notes and prepare a summary report with key themes for ACF.
A3. Improved Information Technology to Reduce Burden
The data collection will occur through in-person group discussion sessions. Participants will be informed that the large group sessions will be recorded for note-taking purposes only.
A4. Efforts to Identify Duplication
ACF consulted with Department of Labor (DOL) Women’s Bureau because they also hosted regional child care meetings in 2018-2019. These meetings were much more open-ended and smaller (only about 10-15 attendees per meeting). DOL staff also confirmed that they thought the ACF Roundtables were very different and would yield much more in-depth information that they were not able to capture in their initial meetings, which were much smaller in size and scope.
A5. Involvement of Small Organizations
Faith and community-based child care providers and small business employers trying to address the child care challenges for their workforce are target audiences for the meeting and will be invited to attend. ACF will work with the HHS Faith and Community-Based Office to assist with recruitment.
A6. Consequences of Less Frequent Data Collection
These are one-time data collections during existing meetings.
A7. Special Circumstances
There are no special circumstances for the proposed data collection efforts.
A8. Federal Register Notice and Consultation
Federal Register Notice and Comments
In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (Pub. L. 104-13) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) regulations at 5 CFR Part 1320 (60 FR 44978, August 29, 1995), ACF published a notice in the Federal Register announcing the agency’s intention to request an OMB review of the overarching generic clearance for formative information collection. This notice was published on October 11, 2017, Volume 82, Number 195, page 47212, and provided a sixty-day period for public comment. A subsequent notice, updated with more specific information, was published on June 18, 2019, Volume 84, Number 117, page 28307, and provided a thirty-day period for public comment. During the notice and comment periods, no substantive comments were received.
A9. Incentives for Respondents
No incentives for respondents are proposed for this information collection.
A10. Privacy of Respondents
Information collected will be kept private to the extent permitted by law. Respondents will be informed that the large group discussions will be recorded and small group discussion will have notetakers. Respondents will be informed of all planned uses of data, that their participation is voluntary, and that their information will be kept private to the extent permitted by law.
As specified in the contract, the Contractor shall protect respondent privacy to the extent permitted by law and will comply with all Federal and Departmental regulations for private information. The Contractor has developed a Data Safety and Monitoring Plan that assesses all protections of respondents’ personally identifiable information. The Contractor shall ensure that all of its employees, subcontractors (at all tiers), and employees of each subcontractor, who perform work under this contract/subcontract, are trained on data privacy issues and comply with the above requirements.
As specified in the evaluator’s contract, the Contractor shall use Federal Information Processing Standard compliant encryption (Security Requirements for Cryptographic Module, as amended) to protect all instances of sensitive information during storage and transmission. The Contractor shall securely generate and manage encryption keys to prevent unauthorized decryption of information, in accordance with the Federal Processing Standard. The Contractor shall: ensure that this standard is incorporated into the Contractor’s property management/control system; establish a procedure to account for all laptop computers, desktop computers, and other mobile devices and portable media that store or process sensitive information. Any data stored electronically will be secured in accordance with the most current National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) requirements and other applicable Federal and Departmental regulations. In addition, the Contractor must submit a plan for minimizing to the extent possible the inclusion of sensitive information on paper records and for the protection of any paper records, field notes, or other documents that contain sensitive or personally identifiable information that ensures secure storage and limits on access.
Information will not be maintained in a paper or electronic system from which data are actually or directly retrieved by an individuals’ personal identifier.
A11. Sensitive Questions
There are no sensitive questions in this data collection.
A12. Estimation of Information Collection Burden
Total Burden Requested Under this Information Collection
Instrument |
Total Number of Respondents |
Number of Responses Per Respondent |
Average Burden Hours Per Response |
Annual Burden Hours |
Average Hourly Wage |
Total Annual Cost |
|||
Roundtable Protocol |
1000 |
1 |
2.5 |
2500 |
$35.56 |
$88,900 |
|||
Estimated Annual Burden Total |
2500 |
|
$88,900 |
||||||
Total Annual Cost
To calculate the annualized cost to respondents for the hour burden, we assume that the typical respondent distribution for each Roundtable meeting will be about one-fifth state or local government officials; one-fifth child care providers; one-fifth community or social services managers; and one-fifth parents. Based on data on our expected respondents from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we use a mean hourly wage for child care directors ($23.05); state government officials ($52.24), local social and community services manager ($31.41) for an average wage for respondent of $35.561.
A13. Cost Burden to Respondents or Record Keepers
There are no additional costs to respondents.
A14. Estimate of Cost to the Federal Government
The cost to the federal government is $342,000, which includes contractor resources from an existing Office of Child Care logistics contract that is being used to support the Roundtables, the production of the final report and staff travel to the meetings.
A15. Change in Burden
This is for an individual information collection under the umbrella formative generic clearance for program support (0970-0531).
A16. Plan and Time Schedule for Information Collection, Tabulation and Publication
The Regional Roundtable Meetings will be scheduled from September through November 2019.
A17. Reasons Not to Display OMB Expiration Date
All instruments will display the expiration date for OMB approval.
A18. Exceptions to Certification for Paperwork Reduction Act Submissions
No exceptions are necessary for this information collection.
1 This is an average of the mean hourly wages for child care directors ($23.05); state government officials ($52.24), local social and community services manager ($31.41). See: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm
| File Type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| File Title | OPRE OMB Clearance Manual |
| Author | DHHS |
| File Modified | 0000-00-00 |
| File Created | 2021-01-13 |