The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021 was signed into law on March 11, 2021, issuing three streams of federal funding to states through the Child Care and Development Fund which include Supplemental Discretionary, Stabilization, and Mandatory/Matching funds. Stabilization funds support states in providing financial relief to childcare programs by helping to defray unexpected business costs associated with the pandemic and to help stabilize childcare program operations. These sub-grants are available for ODJFS regulated child care centers, family childcare (FCC) type A and type B homes, in-home aides (IHA), and approved day camps, as well as Ohio Department of Education (ODE) licensed preschool (PS) and school-age (SA) programs that are approved to provide publicly funded childcare (PFCC).

Here is some good news for you, these funds can be used towards professional development training for you and your staff. The funds can be used towards Ohio General Courses and the Ohio Approved Specialized Trainings. We have some more good news for you! We have made it easier than ever for you to use these funds on our website using a few different options, all of which allow you to keep your training dollars within your organization. You will never lose the money spent due to staff turnover. Here are a few easy ways to help you use these funds to train your staff:

Administrator Access/Bulk Purchasing:

When you have an administrator account on airchildcare.com, the possibilities are endless. You can create accounts for your staff members, track the progress on their courses, print completion certificates for your staff, run staff reports for current enrollments among other things, and bulk purchase. When you bulk purchase, you save yourself time by placing just one order for all staff members that need training by assigning courses directly to your staff during checkout. Simply choose your course and choose as many staff members needed for that course, that’s it! You can do this for any course available on our website. Once you place your order, all of the staff that you selected now have the course(s) in their account ready to complete. We will even send them an email for you, letting them know that courses have been purchased for them.

https://airchildcare.com/company-administrator-acc...

Purchase Orders:

If you would like to use a Purchase Order for these funds, we accept those as well. This is another option to save you time. We will do all the work for you. Simply send AIR the Purchase Order, along with the information for the staff members like their name, email address and what courses they need, and we will take it from there! We will send you an invoice after the order has been processed for you. No need to check out on the website.

https://airchildcare.com/purchase-orders/

Bulk Discount Pricing Program:

This is a customer favorite! Not only will you save yourself time by bulk purchasing, now we have an option to save you money as well! The Bulk Discount Program allows you to purchase a certain amount of store credit to use at any time while getting a reward of a bonus credit at no additional cost to you. For example, let’s say that you want to purchase $2,000 in store credit, not only will you receive the $2,000 on your account, but you will also receive a bonus credit of $200 to use once payment is complete for the original credit amount. The store credit NEVER expires, so you can purchase them now and use them in a year. The amount will be there for you until it is completely used up. Did you have a staff member that didn’t complete a course that was purchased using this program? No problem! We will transfer that amount back to your store credit, or to a new staff member of your choosing. This program will help you in so many ways!

https://airchildcare.com/bulk-pricing/ 

Store Credits:

If you know exactly what you will need training wise 6 months from now but do not want to assign courses today, you can purchase store credit to use at any time. Again, the store credit NEVER expires. It will be there for you on your account when you are ready to use it.

We hope that you find these helpful in maximizing your grant funds! We know how hard the last 2 years have been for you and your staff members, and we are here to help in any way that we can! For questions or assistance in utilizing any of the methods discussed here, please contact AIR’s customer service at (888)994-2247 or by emailing office@airtrainingsolutions.com.