The Lead-Safe Toolkit for Center-Based Child Care
COVID-19: For comprehensive guidance on cleaning, disinfecting, screening, social distancing and other COVID-19 best practices within child care environments, consult the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website. NCHH has also curated a page of resources to assist with the challenges created by COVID-19, including some that may be useful to center-based child care providers, as well as the Healthy Homes Guide to Cleaning and Disinfection, which provides guidance specific to cleaning and disinfecting safely. Visit the Homes and Facilities pages for guidance relevant to home-based and center-based child care settings. Also make sure to consult your state and local reopening guidelines.
Welcome to the Lead-Safe Toolkit for Center-Based Child Care! This toolkit was designed to provide center-based child care providers with resources and strategies to ensure the safety of their child care facilities. The toolkit is divided into four main categories – paint, drinking water, soil, and consumer products – plus a general resources section. Each of the four categories contains a sample policy you can adopt for your business and share with your clients, along with a worksheet to help you set the policy into action, one step at a time. Each worksheet gives you valuable information about the importance of ensuring that facilities are lead-safe, gives approximate costs of measures to reduce lead exposure, and provides links to resources and contacts you can consult as you implement the policy.
This toolkit is a work in progress, so check back to view the additional resources as we add them in the near future.
WEBINAR SERIES: This four-part webinar series was created for home-based child care businesses, but the information applies to center-based child care facilities as well. You’ll learn how to protect the children entrusted to your care from lead hazards found in paint, water, soil, and consumer products. You don’t have to watch the webinars in order. Watch the series on YouTube:
Click each image below to view and download the toolkit resources pertaining to the respective topic.
Get the Lead Safety Poster
Let your clients know that your child care business is committed to protecting children from lead exposure by downloading, printing, and displaying our poster, Things We Do to Protect Children from Lead.
Download this poster and display it at your child care facility.
When you click the poster image (left), the poster will open in a new tab. You can then download the file and email it to the printer of your choice. Be sure to display the poster prominently in your child care facility and share the policy documents found in the toolkit with your child care families.
About This Project
With support from the JPB Foundation, Eco-Healthy Child Care® (a national program of the Children’s Environmental Health Network), the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), and the National Center for Healthy Housing have partnered to help center-based child care providers eliminate lead in their facilities by developing the Lead-Safe Toolkit for Center-Based Child Care.
The Lead-Safe Toolkit for Center-Based Child Care includes policies and worksheets for lead in paint, drinking water, soil, and consumer products, as well as a webinar series to acquaint child care providers with the toolkit and provide technical assistance about how to adopt lead prevention policies most effectively. We’ll also post testimonies from center-based child care providers, sharing their experiences as they work to protect the children in their care and their own families from lead hazards.