No Washington County providers have joined UNL child care study, but some may qualify
Published 2:41 pm Monday, October 5, 2026
No home-based child care providers in Washington County have signed up for a University of Nebraska–Lincoln study that offers free training, 19 in-service hours and up to $595 in Amazon gift cards. The study team says some local providers may still qualify if they act soon.
The study, Healthy Children, Healthy Communities, is open to licensed home-based providers in rural Nebraska and Kansas. The word “rural” is where Washington County gets complicated. By a common federal measure, the county counts as urban.
“Although Washington County as a whole may be considered urban under the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes, we also use a more specific geographic classification to determine whether an individual child care home is located in a rural area,” said Ashna Chauhan, a UNL graduate research assistant who coordinates recruitment and data collection for the study.
The study team checks each provider’s street address with the National Center for Education Statistics’ Locale Lookup tool. Addresses classified as Rural: Fringe, Rural: Distant or Rural: Remote meet the requirement. Eligibility depends on where a provider’s home sits, not on the county’s label.
Providers must also be licensed for home-based child care and be enrolled in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). They must serve meals and snacks and care for at least two children ages 3 to 5 who eat at least one meal and one snack in the program at least two days a week.
As of Sept. 28, the study had a few openings left in this year’s group. Chauhan said the team expected recruitment to continue for one to two more weeks, or until the remaining spots are filled.
Participants can receive up to $595 in Amazon gift cards for personal use, 19 in-service training hours, a toolkit of interactive activities for children and resources for parents. There is no cost to take part.
Providers are randomly assigned to one of two 16-week online programs, which they complete at their own pace. EAT Family Style focuses on healthy eating and positive mealtimes, including practical ways to encourage children to try different foods. Better Kid Care covers child growth and development more broadly.
Chauhan estimated the time commitment at one to two hours a week. Participants also complete three 30- to 40-minute online surveys about the mealtime environment and up to five shorter surveys about the children’s eating habits.
UNL research assistants also make six visits to each participating home, about an hour each. During the visits, they observe meals and snacks, video record lunch, and measure children’s height, weight and fruit and vegetable intake using a non-invasive Veggie Meter scan.
For Washington County parents, those visits are the part of the study most likely to reach them. No child is included without a parent’s permission, Chauhan said. Parents whose children are not in the study still get a letter telling them the research team will be coming, and they can opt out.
The researchers want a clearer picture of what young children eat in child care, and whether the training changes mealtimes. UNL’s Institutional Review Board, which oversees research involving people, approved the procedures. The National Institutes of Health is funding the work.
For a local provider, the first step is entering the child care home’s address in the NCES lookup at nces.ed.gov/programs/maped/LocaleLookup. If the result is one of the three rural categories, the provider can fill out an interest form at go.unl.edu/hchc3. The study team reviews each form, tells the provider whether they qualify and, if so, sets up a Zoom call to go over the study and the consent paperwork.
Questions go to the study team at unlhealthychildren@unl.edu or 402-472-2605.
