Nebraska's Childcare Quality Rating System: What It Means for Directors and Staff

Nebraska's quality rating and improvement system is Step Up to Quality, created by the Step Up to Quality Child Care Act in 2013.

The Act rates child care and early childhood education programs on a quality scale using ratings labeled steps one through five.

Participation is voluntary, with one statutory exception: a program that received more than $250,000 in child care assistance in the preceding fiscal year must apply for a rating.

The statute writes the duty to reach each applicable child care or early childhood education program, and it measures the threshold in child care assistance received in the preceding fiscal year.

Step Up to Quality runs on five steps.

Licensure under the Child Care Licensing Act for a program serving children from birth to kindergarten-entrance age is, by itself, sufficient criteria for Step One.

National accreditation, Head Start standards or public pre-K criteria — with reporting to the professional record system — qualify a program for Step Three.

Our research verified these statutory baselines but not the criteria tables for Steps Two, Four and Five, so a director working toward a specific step needs the current criteria from the program administrator.

One requirement spans every step above Step One: reporting staff degrees, credentials and training to NECPRS.

The staff-side requirement the statutes set runs through reporting.

To be rated above Step One, a program must report the educational degrees and professional credentials held, and the relevant training completed, by its child care and early childhood education employees to NECPRS.

Those reports make each employee's degrees, credentials and completed training part of what the program files toward its rating.

Our research did not extract the criteria tables that translate specific degrees, credentials or training hours into a particular step, so build credential plans from the program administrator's current criteria rather than from assumptions.

Which observation or assessment instrument, if any, Step Up to Quality requires at higher steps is not established in our research.

The statutes our research verified set the five-step scale, the Step One and Step Three baselines and the NECPRS reporting duty, but none of them names an observation tool, and the program's criteria documents were not read for this page.

Before you schedule assessments or train staff on a specific instrument, get the current criteria from the agency that administers the system.

The staff incentive our research documents is the School Readiness Tax Credit: eligible early childhood staff claim a refundable state income tax credit keyed to their NECPRS level.

The statutory base amounts run $2,300 at Level 1, $2,600 at Level 2, $2,900 at Level 3, $3,200 at Level 4 and $3,500 at Level 5; from tax year 2025 the Tax Commissioner adjusts them for inflation, so current-year amounts differ, and the credits are capped in aggregate under §77-3606.

The credit keys to the individual's NECPRS record; our research ties it to no program-level rating, and eligibility conditions beyond the NECPRS level were not detailed in our research.

For centers, our research found no Step Up to Quality bonus and no subsidy rate add-on tied to a step; ask the program administrator what supports attach to higher ratings today.

The preparation steps a director can ground in verified rules run in order.

First, check whether the mandate reaches your program at all: a program that received more than $250,000 in child care assistance in the preceding fiscal year must apply for a rating.

Second, place your program on the statutory scale — licensure alone is Step One, and national accreditation, Head Start standards or public pre-K criteria with reporting to the record system qualify for Step Three.

Third, for any rating above Step One the statutory duty is to report its employees' degrees, credentials and completed training to NECPRS, so staff records are the concrete preparation task.

The criteria tables for the individual steps and the observation instrument sit outside our research; get them from the program administrator before committing a training or staffing budget to a step number.

The one subsidy tie in our research is the participation threshold: Step Up to Quality is voluntary unless a program received more than $250,000 in child care assistance under §68-1202 in the preceding fiscal year, in which case it must apply.

What a higher step does to a center's subsidy reimbursement rates was not documented in our research, so a director weighing the revenue case for a rating should ask the administering agency what the current rate structure rewards.

NECPRS — the Nebraska Early Childhood Professional Record System, run by the Nebraska State Department of Education — is the registry a program's staff reporting goes to.

A program pursuing any rating above Step One reports its employees' degrees, credentials and completed training there.

Staff benefit from it too: the School Readiness Tax Credit is a refundable state income tax credit keyed to the individual's NECPRS level, so a staff member's own record in the registry carries value beyond the program's rating.

How an employee establishes or updates a NECPRS level was not covered in our research; ask the Nebraska State Department of Education how levels are set and updated.