Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) introduced child care legislation, S. 2980, on Tuesday, May 6.  The Starting Early Starting Right Act, amends the Child Care and Development Block Grant to increase the quality of child care by addressing the following issues:

1.  creating an Office of Child Care within the Department of Health and Human Services that would be equal to the Office of Head Start;
2.  requiring at least one annual announced inspection and one annual unannounced inspection;
3.  requiring 40 hours of pre-service training and 24 hours of on-going training for child care providers; 
4.  extending the amount of time a family can receive a subsidy without reapplying to one year and lengthening the period of job search eligibility to achieve continuous care; and
5.  increases the quality set-aside to 15 percent of the state’s CCDBG funds (and one of the permissible uses of quality dollars is to maintain a state network of child care resource & referral programs).

  You can find the text of both pieces of legislation by visiting http://www.thomas.gov and typing in the bill numbers.