The Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families issued another important press release announcing that it has now completed negotiations with 160 initial winners of the first round of competition under the Designation Renewal System per 45 CFR 1307. Ultimately, 153 grantees were awarded grants during the first round of recompetition.
The first group of 132 grantees were notified in December of 2011 that they would be required to recompete for their current federal Head Start and Early Head Start funds.
We described the process by which the initial winners were selected when that list was released earlier this year.
The press release included a summary of the process to date and reiterated the evaluation process:
In this first round of competition, all competitors had to submit proposals detailing how they would achieve Head Start’s goal of delivering high-quality early childhood services to the nation’s most vulnerable infants, toddlers and preschoolers. These proposals were subjected to an extensive evaluation process, including review by a panel of independent early childhood professionals and assessment by Certified Public Accountants to determine a potential grantee’s ability to implement Head Start’s mission and standards in their community. In a few cases, the panel determined that an existing grant would be more effective if it was split up amongst multiple agencies, bringing the total number of grants yielded from the first round of competition to 153.
When the initial list was published in April, we provided links to the agencies that entered negotiations, by state and county/city. We publish a comparison to the initial list to this final list in the next day or so.
Just to be clear: no. The question on everyone’s mind was not answered directly in the press release. Where does this leave the second group of grantees who were notified in January that they would need to recompete for their grants? Essentially the same place – on notice, no RFP/RFA yet. The press release did say:
The competitive process for those service areas will open to the public later this summer.
Later this summer.
The first day of autumn is September 22, 2013…so we can only assume it will be between now and then. Everyone is interested – we are too – so we’ll keep you posted.
Thank you.
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