Early Childhood Health and Safety
In 2024, AgriLife Extension Family and Community Health faculty and staff supported the child care workforce in Texas and beyond by reaching nearly 90,000 early childhood educators, ECEs, through online and face-to-face trainings focused on the latest research in health and safety, nutrition, and child development. ECEs enrolled in over 579,000 online courses, enabling them to complete state-mandated training requirements and increase their knowledge of best practices in the early childhood field. AgriLife Extension’s ECE workforce trainings directly support 76,000 jobs with an annual wage base of $2.7 billion.
Promoting Early Education Quality
Quality matters in early childhood education. Children who receive high-quality care develop better language, math and social skills; exhibit fewer behavior problems; and tend to be better prepared for entrance into school. Having a well-trained early childhood workforce is essential to providing the high-quality care and education that children need to reach their developmental potential. AgriLife Extension’s Promoting Early Education Quality, PEEQ, program provides a range of educational activities and resources designed to enhance the quantity and quality of early care and education services available to Texas families. These include professional development opportunities for ECEs and administrators; training for industry-adjacent professionals who provide support for ECE programs; and tools to strengthen the ECE policies, systems and environments, PSE, which impact young children’s health and development. AgriLife Extension’s PEEQ online training program, one of the leading online learning platforms for ECEs in the nation, offers more than 200 courses to ECEs in Texas and beyond.
In FY 2024, 83,501 ECEs enrolled in 579,868 online courses and completed over 417,000. Since 2014, the program has recorded nearly four million online course completions by ECEs from across the U.S., which is equivalent to more than seven million clock hours of training. In addition, AgriLife Extension provided instructor-led training to nearly 5,000 ECE professionals through a combination of in-person and webinar-based professional development events.
To support ECE professionals in adopting some of the best practices they learned in these trainings, faculty and staff trained 66 individuals, including Texas Master Gardener and Texas Master Naturalist volunteers and/or County Extension Agents, on strategies to increase access to naturalized outdoor learning environments in ECE programs.
An additional 37 individuals, including local health department staff, completed the required training to serve as Technical Assistance, TA, Consultants for ECE facilities participating in the Texas Healthy Building Blocks Recognition System. This system is an obesity prevention program powered by the evidence-based Go NAPSACC toolkit, which guides ECEs through self-assessment, goal setting, adopting changes and, when they reach certain milestones, recognition. In FY 2024, 23 ECE facilities participated in the program, with eight earning recognition in one or more of the seven available recognition areas. The expansion of TA Consultant support means that in FY 2025 the program will be available in 51 counties.
These classes are just amazing … please keep up the good work of [providing] quality training classes. Thank you.”
