For more than 20 years, United Way has made high-quality early care and education a cornerstone priority of its investment strategy. With a commitment to increasing child care quality, United Way launched the SB6 school readiness program in 2007 to help child care centers improve their quality level in the Keystone STARS four-STAR system.
As a community-based program aimed at promoting and sustaining quality in child care centers, SB6 provides insights and lessons that can be applied to existing quality improvement initiatives locally, statewide, and nationally. This paper describes the history and components of SB6 and synthesizes the results of recent evaluation findings to highlight successes and challenges.