Ensuring children receive nutritious meals throughout the day—and childcare providers are reimbursed accurately.
Childcare providers who serve nutritious meals to children are required to follow rigorous, and often confusing regulations in order to receive compensation.
Wonderschool can establish a leadership role in providing a comprehensive set of services for childcare providers, and streamlining provider-to-government interactions.
Providers can focus their attention on facilitating quality care for children, and can receive remuneration quickly and accurately.
In 2020, COVID accelerated a push for unique, affordable childcare, and in response, state governments began to fund small-group childcare providers. While the government offered compensation to subsidize these new programs, the providers—often operating out of their homes, and within thin financial margins—found themselves responsible for complying with complicated and vague safety and reporting requirements.
These providers were attempting to navigate paper forms, short-staffed government offices, and complexities of online systems. It is against this backdrop that Wonderschool envisioned a new product offering: a suite of solutions to support the challenges providers face in staying compliant in running their facilities.
This suite would be made of modules, and the first module was focused on food program—ensuring that children were served healthy diets that conformed to health guidelines, and supporting providers in claiming reimbursement for these meals.
Caregivers in the United States are provided with an opportunity to receive financial assistance from the government, in exchange for taking care of children in their homes. A requirement for receiving this assistance is providing nutritious meals, and reporting the distribution of those meals.
These requirements are in place to ensure children receive healthy meals. However, the requirements can be confusing to understand, and it’s difficult for providers to track and provide evidence of compliance with the requirements.
However, the requirements can be confusing to understand, and it’s difficult for providers to track and provide evidence of compliance with the requirements. Wonderschool’s Food Program solution provides a simple way for providers to select items from an approved list, ensuring that each ingredient “counts” for compliance.
Additionally, they can choose from pre-created menus that are nutritious, delicious, and conform with state guidelines. And, providers can easily edit menus based on ingredient availability or cultural preferences and styles.
— Chris Bennett, CEO Wonderschool.
Caregivers also struggle to manage the unique needs of individual children, such as allergies or food preferences. They prepare and serve food in an exciting and vibrant environment, and it can be difficult to ensure all children have their unique needs met.
Wonderschool’s Food Program solution remembers the unique needs of each child, and presents those in a simple and straightforward manner, so substitutions can be made and accounted for. Food tracking is drop-dead simple, and a group with extremely diverse needs can be fed and accounted for in minutes.
The process can be convoluted for the state regulators, as well. They interact with multiple systems, are often short-staffed, and regularly juggle paper forms. Additionally, the regulators find themselves acting as intermediaries between sponsors – who act as support structures for providers - and the providers themselves, which is time consuming.
And, regulators and program administrators are responsible for the highly emotional task of paying providers, who depend on the money to continue operating their programs. The Wonderschool Food Program solution helps providers submit their reporting in a consistent way, so regulators can quickly confirm compliance, calculate a reimbursement amount, and pay providers quickly and accurately.
Providers now have the ability to track meal expenses digitally, in real-time, which reduces the need to maintain hard-copy forms, binders and static spreadsheets.
Administrative and record keeping time has been reduced from approximately four hours per weeks to under one hour.
Providers can now create and save custom weekly and monthly meal plans that are 100% compliant with state and federal regulations.
The Wonderschool Food Program allows providers to save a significant amount of time on administrative tasks and facilitates accurate and efficient expense reimbursement.
Providers can focus more time on building quality childcare programs while saving time, money and resources.
