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birth to five and school-age programs to provide training and coaching on the benefits of serving children with disabilities and on modifying and adapting the classroom environment and activities to accommodate all children. The team provides a training series for early learning professionals focusing on understanding the laws that support children with disabilities, and strategies to implement universal design practices that support all learners in early learning environments. Educators receive a stipend and classroom materials for training completion. The Lead Agency provides the training series to three cohorts of early learning professionals. The Lead Agency also provides an Adaptive Learning Mini-Grant to early learning professionals who would benefit from technical assistance to support children with disabilities in their care. Professionals receive coaching from a SEEDS specialist; to support the child’s development, The Lead Agency plans to fund at least 75 mini-grants over the next three years. The Lead Agency is currently piloting an Infant Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (IECMHC) Program, which pairs a master's level mental health professional with a SEEDS specialist to provide enhanced support to teachers, child care center staff, children, and their families. This program helps with the early identification of children with persistent challenging behaviors or who have experienced early childhood trauma (such as the foster care population, children with high Adverse Childhood Experiences [ACES], exposure to domestic violence and abuse, etc.). IECMHC also supports caregivers, including teachers and parents, to access mental health treatment and resources effectively in their communities. Currently, seven mental health consultants are serving 12 child care programs. The Lead Agency is conducting an evaluation of the pilot project which will inform expansion of the program over the next three years.

An additional strategy that is focused on increasing the supply of child care for children with disabilities is through a research partnership with the Urban Institute to better understand the unique demands for services by families with children with a disability and data sources that can be collected regularly that can inform the demand for this population throughout the state. In addition, the ongoing research is reviewing the characteristics of the child care supply for these families to understand gaps in supply and services critical to serving children with disabilities. This research will help the Lead Agency to establish criteria and a data framework by which to measure supply at the statewide level and various local levels where greater variation may exist for children with disabilities and support policy and program initiatives to build supply for this population more appropriately. d. Children who receive care during non-traditional hours. Describe: DECAL contracted with the Urban Institute to better understand the need for non-traditional hour child care in Georgia through surveys of providers, focus groups with families who need non-traditional hour care, and analyses of DECAL administrative data and statewide census data. While DECAL collects and tracks the operating hours that licensed programs are authorized to open, programs may open later or close earlier than their authorized hours. Defining nontraditional hour child care as between 6:00 PM and 7:00 AM on weekdays and any time on weekends, the Urban Institute found that DECAL may be overestimating the supply of nontraditional hour care by as much as 50 percent by comparing provider survey-reported operating hours to licensed operating hours. To address the gap in available non-traditional hour child care, DECAL launched the Expanding Parents Access to Nontraditional Delivery (EXPAND) grants program in fall 2023. There are two types of