The Road to NAEYC Accreditation

 The road to accreditation is a fairly lengthy one, but it is designed to help you develop your program and bring it into alignment with the 10 NAEYC standards and their criteria. The phase of self study is the time when you initially ( if you haven't already ) start practicing a more intentional approach to teaching and caring for young children, working to align your program with the NAEYC standards. During this time you are also collecting your own data, assessing your progress through the collected data, and you will also select a sample of this data as evidence of your readiness to begin the application and assessment process for NAEYC accreditation.
  In order to prove that they are indeed ready to move forward with the assessment, toward the ultimate goal of accreditation, the program must submit their sample data as a part of their application in order to even be considered for candidacy, to include all documented evidence of the entire teaching staff's education and qualifications, diplomas, stars training, CDA's, CPR, etc..., failure to provide these documents would result in you being unable to be assessed for further assessment. Once a program has entered into the assessment phase, they must prepare for a site visit at any time during a six month window, also ensuring to providing an additional sample set of data, as a part of the hard copy evidence for the NAEYC assessor at the time of their assessment.
  Those programs that do become accredited are accredited for a five year term, however, they must be careful to maintain their level of program quality, and maintain their alignment with the NAEYC standards, or else if they fall beneath a certain level of alignment, they risk losing their accredited status.
  The road to accreditation usually takes around two years, and it is very worth it. If and when you do bring your program into alignment with the NAEYC standards, and you attain your accreditation, then you know that you and your program have truly have progressed in how you assist young children in their learning and development.
  I feel it is worth mentioning that there are those programs who enroll in the self study process, simply to begin the self study process itself and they do not necessarily intend to move into the application phase within the usual time frame, if ever.

 I believe that the NAEYC standards and accreditation process are extremely beneficial to those programs who enroll in and utilize it.

I have included a link to the NAEYC accreditation webinar, detailing the steps of applying for NAEYC accreditation as well as NAEYC own resources to better facilitate the application process.

http://www.naeyc.org/files/academy/file/webinar/4steps/player.html