 Ralph Grafana Program Director at the Council of Chief State School Offices and I welcome you to our second webinar, the four that we are scheduled to talk about the school community partnership and the whole child approach in early childhood education and lower elementary grades. We're very, very pleased to have this webinar that is put together as a project of several organizations which I'd like to mention the National Association of Elementary School Principles, the Superintendent's Association AASA, the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists at State Departments of Education, the Education Development Center and the Council of Chief State School Officers that has come together with the help of New America to host this event for you and we are very pleased to have four wonderful panelists here today that will delve into the topic that we're going to cover today which is comprehensive services. If you attended the last webinar last week, we talked about the capacity of teaching and learning in those kinds of early learning settings and we want to continue by having this dialogue about comprehensive services. But before I go to that, I wanted to remind you about some national models that we are looking at that have really proven to be effective, outstanding and wonderful exemplars of early childhood and comprehensive services. The first center is the child parent center or P3, it's operated out of the University of Minnesota and has sites in three different states in the Midwest. The Buffett Superintendent Early Childhood Plan is one project that's located in Omaha and Nebraska and it is operated by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute. First 10 has a number of sites across the country that are coordinated by the Education Development Center. At the Maryland State Department of Education, there are 56 Judy centers in Maryland that offer these comprehensive services and first school has been around for two decades and it's operated by the University of North Carolina. Next slide, please. I do want to welcome you now to our participants and panelists for this wonderful conversation that we're going to have about these types of services at the school or early childhood level. Lisa earlier is the Director of Families at Parks and Recreation Department at the City of Orlando. Then we have Katie Hernandez, the principal of the George Washington Elementary School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We welcome Cameron Mulspo, principal at the Cool Spring Elementary School in Adelphi, Maryland. And then LaWanda Wesley, Director of Quality Enhancement and Professional Development, Early Childhood Education Department at the Oakland Unified School District. Today we examine the type of services for young children and their families that occur under one roof and connect the emotional and social well-being, family support, and engagement in health services with the early learning programs. This pandemic has shown us anything in early education. It is the need to take on a broader perspective as early learning programs in childcare at start and in schools address the impact the pandemic has had on families of young children. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed fundamental flaws in the systems that support children and families in the United States. Addressing these weaknesses is essential to ending racial injustice and addressing inequality. This is a moment in time to consider how we can best set up early childhood educators and professionals to be successful both during the pandemic and as we rebuild systems in its aftermath. How can communities and states advance equity and build comprehensive approaches that promote whole child learning and development from birth through the elementary school? For that, we invited now the panelists to talk about in more detail as to how they approach this kind of work. Now let's get started. I want to go to each of you to just give us a short overview of your program that you represent and how it provides comprehensive services to families and to young children. Let's start with Katie and your school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Please, Katie. Hi. Thank you, Ralph. My name is Katie Hernandez. I am the principal at George Washington Elementary School, which is located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is in the south central region of the state. Oftentimes, when you think of Lancaster, you probably think of farmlands and the Amish. That is not my school area. Lancaster County has a lot of that, but we also are a small city. We have about 60,000 residents and our district serves about 12,000 diverse students. My school typically has about 560 students enrolled due to the pandemic. Our enrollment has significantly dropped. We are sitting at around 460 students at the moment. We are a Title I school with about a 95% poverty rate, and we have students in K-4, which is a four-year-old preschool-type program, full day through fifth grade, and we also house a community Head Start classroom in our building. We are, like I said, a full-service community school in partnership with the Boys and Girls Club, and we really look at our school as a hub of services for our neighborhood. We have a variety of health and social service partnerships, family engagement, youth development, and community engagement. Some of those examples of some of the partnerships include school-based mental health and family-based services for our families. We have a health clinic in partnership with the local hospital, as well as an eye clinic. We have on-site family literacy classes with a focus on English as a second language. We partner with Early Head Start as well as Head Start. We work with a local anti-poverty organization with focus areas in workforce development, and education programming, and other early education programs, such as parents' teachers, with parent cafes as well, and over the last three years, we've really shifted our focus as a general scope of a full-service community school into a first-ten community school, which has allowed us to expand our supports to not only our school-aged children, but also to children prior to them entering our school. Thank you. This is an enormous breath in terms of services that you offer, but it's not just the services. It seems to also be sort of a community hub. You're known for being a place where families are comfortable and know that the children will be doing well, so thank you. Lavanda is representing an urban school district in Oakland, California, and let's hear about your approach to this kind of work. Yes, hi, everybody. Welcome. Happy Thursday. Happy Fridays, Eve. I'm so excited to talk about Oakland Nephi School District's Early Learning Program initiative. We decided in the last few years to really look at trauma responsive and building resilience initiative that is highly supported by Oakland's Starting Smart and Strong with funding from the David Lucille Packard Foundation, and I can't say enough. We have typically 1,600 students in our early education in terms of enrollment, but this year we're down by 50%, just having a little over 800 children now, and I serve at the pleasure of over 200 amazing educators, including our special education department. And our trauma initiative is called Resilient Oakland Community and Kids. And basically what we decided to do with this initiative is look at a whole child, whole family, whole community approach that says it's not just to aim our supports at looking at children who may have been exposed and impacted by trauma, but we have to look at the ecosystem of which these children are being served in, and those are us, the adults, and primarily our early educators who also live and reside in the same community and said, you know what, Ms. Wanda, we are also faced with some of the same trauma, food insecurities, violence within the community, right? All of these things, we are relying on subsidies for food and things like that. So, and public housing. And so we have a community, I say, that is impacted by the same conditions, but again, it's not hopeless. It's not a situation where they can't resolve and get out of that. But we had to turn our support first to the adults who are providing the care to disrupt and dismantle the trauma that the children were facing. So that's our initiative and the nutshell. I'll talk a little bit more about that. But we are really excited and we're really happy to have the support of Oakland who is starting Smart and Strong, and the David Lucille Packard Foundation and the broader Oakland community that's also a part of this work. Thank you, Alma. This is a great example of just how in an urban setting, the community comes together and work on some particular issues that are so very critical that trauma-informed care and resilience building within your student population and the families is such a critical element right now as we go through the pandemic. So we'll talk about that a little more. So Cameron, your school got built because you already had an early childhood program for years on their campus with many services under one roof and strong community connections. Tell us about your school. Good afternoon. Cameron Mills-Paul Principal of Cool Spring Elementary in Adelphi, Maryland, which is located about 10 minutes away from Washington DC and about 20 to 25 minutes away from Baltimore. We service in our school population a large Esau group of students, about 60 to 70 percent. We, on a normal year, and anything is not normal at this point, but on a normal year we have about 920 regular boundary students that come to our building for pre-K to 6th grade. This year we are a little bit under enrolled and we are under enrolled in our early childhood grades for reasons of the COVID and we currently have about 822 students. We are right in the middle of Adelphi, Maryland, so we service as a building in the community. We are there for the community, not just there for the students to come and attend school and get an education, but we are there as a reciprocal approach to the students and the families and the needs that they have. We are about 95 percent farms and an equal amount of that in a Latin Latinx Latino community for Hispanic Spanish-speaking families. We are very close partners with the Judy Hoyer Family Learning Center and that is the representation that I bring today because they were the original Judy Center in the state which is also affiliated with an early education member whose husband is a state congressman and the need to provide services to students who were less affluent, low income, and needing support from from birth until school age is the purpose of our building and that partnership. So one of the things that we do is partner with them very closely. There's over 32 partnerships that we have under an MOU that provide services for mental health, for diaper needs, for toddlers and infants, to medical. We have a pediatric unit right on our premises that is partnered with our Judy Center and our school. We're currently working with the State Department at MSDE or Maryland State Department of Education to put a school-based health clinic on site that would have family nurse practitioners being able to service those children and those families and anybody who has an influence on them and that's a great exciting part. We also work with Interact theaters where we can provide literacy and storytelling. We're also there to provide support through child care opportunities in order to get the prior care that is necessary and through a lot of other agencies that provide support including the school system support where we are inclusive of the early childhood office, the before and after care extended learning program. We also offer the Department of Family and Community Engagement, the Title I office because we are also a Title I school, the community school office. We are recently identified as a community school and psychological services. That put together with a whole host of other things. We work comprehensively in the community for the community on a daily basis. Comprehensive services, Cameron, would lead up to the community school concept that you have. So it really has an alignment of birth to grade five and this is just one of the examples that we have here today. So Lisa, you're working with a large community-based organization in Orlando with quite an array of children's programs. Can you tell us about those? Yes, Ron, thank you very much. I appreciate it and appreciate everybody's time participating in this webinar. I actually work for city government, the city of Orlando. So I do oversee all of the city's children's programs. But I'm going to hone in on one particular initiative in our city's lowest income neighborhood. It is a replication of Harlem children's own. Some people may be familiar with the model. It is a cradle to career model in a very clearly defined geographic area. We started this initiative in 2006 in our city's lowest income neighborhood and have been operating it ever since. I'm going to talk a little bit about the neighborhood, the types of investments we've been making there, and then a little bit about the impact of the program to date, and then some good news about replication, which we're about to commence. So the neighborhood in Orlando is called Paramore. It was selected because it has the highest poverty rates, highest juvenile arrest rates, teen birth rates, and so on and so forth. Back in 2006, when we started the program, there were about 1,400 children under the age of 18 residing in the neighborhood, 73% of them below the federal poverty level. And then since the program is cradle to career, we generally go up to age 25. So our total population is approximately 1,800 to 1,900 children and youth. 84% of the children were living in single-parent households. 47% of the adults in the neighborhood over the age of 25 did not have either a high school diploma or a GED. The median household income was about $13,000 a year. We did a neighborhood survey in the first year of the program with 100 randomly selected households raising children in the neighborhood, and 86% of the parents reported that they ran out of money before the end of the month. 32% of the children had lost a loved one in the past year, and it was most likely a parent, and the reason was either death or incarceration. And 78% of parents said they needed more help with their children. So ever since then, we have been investing about $2.5 million a year in evidence-based children's programs in the neighborhood, and grassroots door-to-door outreach to connect a critical mass of the neighborhood's children and youth to these evidence-based programs, with the theory of change being that if you connect a critical mass of children to programs that research shows works, you should see the needle move on things like juvenile crime, teen pregnancies, academic performance of children, and so on and so forth. This is a collective impact model, so it is not just the city doing this. It is all partner organizations, whether that be the schools that the children attend, three neighborhood centers operated by the city and the neighborhood, multiple nonprofit organizations, church organizations, and so on and so forth. So those funds are invested in all of the partner organizations, and they are invested to achieve the following goals, which are to increase the number of young children attending high-quality preschool, build positive parenting skills among parents of children under the age of five, mitigate family economic instability, enhance children's physical health and wellness, support the academic success of children in elementary, middle, and high school, increase the number of youth entering and completing post-secondary education, and keeping older youth out of trouble and on a positive track towards social and economic success. And last year, the program served just shy of 1,200 children, and of those, 356 were under the age of five. And since we're focused in this webinar on the birth to five or birth to third grade population, I'm going to just speak very briefly to some of the impacts of this type of investment over this long period of time for the under five population. We have seen 117 percent increase in the number of young children under the age of five attending preschool. We've also had targeted strategies to improve the quality of preschool education or to move children into high-quality preschool environments. And we have seen, actually, this is since 2017, the attendance of high-quality preschool has increased by 49 percent to 82 percent of children now in the neighborhood attending high-quality preschool education. And the good news is that we had always said, give us the money, let us make the investments, we can prove we can move the needle on academic performance, juvenile crime, teen births, which we have, and then give us the funds to replicate it. And on October 1st, the city allocated funds to begin replicating this program in three more city neighborhoods. Thank you. Well, this is very impressive. And you got into some of the outcome data. That's very good to hear. And I think we're going to talk about this a little more. I can see these four examples that we have here for this webinar today are really looking at three things. The alignment of what happens early on in the children's lives and then how that transitions into school and then further on, even in the school program in Orlando, even all the way to high school and beyond. And then the second piece is that it is just a huge effort to connect all the various support services that are needed to have it available for families and for the children, but also have what you call the collective impact in the way we serve our families in certain low-income neighborhoods or in general for families in all sorts of neighborhoods across those states that you're serving. And the third thing that I've noticed is really that you have a strong commitment toward this whole child approach. The philosophical approaches are very much represented in what you told us. I would like to start with Cameron to give us maybe a little bit more detail on what it looks like when a child comes from an early childhood center, like in your case, the Judy Center, into your school. And with all these services, you mentioned more than 30 kind of partnerships that you have established. How does this continue when the children come into first grade and second grade and third grade? And what does that look like from a family's perspective? Sure. Thank you. With working with the Judy Center, they really work in collaboration and communication with a lot of outside agencies and early childhood centers in the community. And we have monthly steering meetings where we are there and we provide an intellectual support of communication, the coordination of services, the collaboration of efforts. And when we build that up from the early birth part and we work with the families throughout the community over a period of years, when they are ready to come to school, they have that prior care. And one of the big things that we focus on is the prior care of instruction to set them ready for kindergarten readiness. If we can work in the community and provide that support by the time they come to us in pre-K, they have an educational foundation that we can build on. And over the years, if we look at some data, I can tell you that we made a 30 percentage point jump in our kindergarten readiness in the last couple of years because of the partnership that we have with the Hoyer Center, with the community agencies, the early childhood centers. And currently, one of the things we're working in in a post-COVID time is how do we identify the students who are less than four years old in the community in order to get them into those educational opportunities and then bring them in with the ground foundation that we need to prepare them for kindergarten and beyond. So one of the things that we look at in that wraparound service is what kind of mental health opportunities do we need to provide? What kind of employment opportunities and linguistic opportunities do we need to provide not only to the children but to the families? What are the basic staples that they need in order to just get by on a daily basis so that their basic needs are taken care of so they can focus on educational things? And this is part and parcel to what the community partnerships that we have do, but more importantly what the Judy Hoyer Center does in collaboration with the school. If we look at it beyond the kindergarten and the pre-case setting, they still support us as we age them up into the higher grades. If there are siblings that are in those grades now, they can provide that support. It is a full family opportunity as well as a wraparound service. And wraparound services to me and the collaboration with my partners at the Hoyer Center and in the community are huge. We can't take care of the academics until we take care of other things. So we want to take care of language opportunities. So one of the things that helps us in the community of our school is we have a dual language program and that starts at kindergarten. And we are looking at expanding that to pre-k as well where students are taught half the day in their native language and half the day in English. And then that would progress and we've been doing that for four years now and we're in third grade with a cohort that grows year after year after year. Arts integration. So with an interact story theater that brings this in in an arts integration fashion and they do plays and they do storytelling, which is supported again by our partnerships at the Judy Hoyer Center. We bring that into a full school approach and we are now arts integrated as a school. The language support to the parents allows them to be educated and the community partnerships that we have with community colleges that help them understand employment opportunities for the families. These are all the part of the work that we do. And I think if I were to summarize it, I would have to say that we see things differently. And the emphasis being on C, the letter, not the word. So what do we do that makes us work as an agency and an entity in the community that's not just a school, not just a Hoyer Learning Center, but a full wraparound service. And it comes down to we coordinate our efforts. We collaborate with each other. We communicate with each other. We connect with each other and other agencies. And we are community involved for the care and education of the children from birth through elementary. And that helps us to see our work in what we're doing. Yeah, that's wonderful. And I think it's what I really love about this is the fact that you take not only a whole child approach, but a well rounded educational approach to this. As you mentioned the arts and the way you support dual language learners in your school. And of course, families have younger siblings and older ones in your elementary school. So there is that kind of interaction going on for the entire family with different age groups of kids in their families. So Lisa, you work with a community organization for this city. What is your connection to the schools? And how would you, especially with these young learners in pre-K or preschool programs transitioning into schools, what is your formal mechanism to make that work for those kids and the families? Thank you for that question. I appreciate it. Again, our approach is very much a cradle to career approach and we're working with a neighborhood. So that relationship with the children and the family members is for a lifetime. It's not sort of one organization that works with the younger kids and one that works with the elementary school and one that works with the middle school and one that works with the older. It's all of us as a team working with all of the families and because it's a tight neighborhood and we've been doing this program for a long, long time, we've all sort of become a family. So in the early days of implementing this, we had committees. We had an elementary school committee, a preschool committee, a youth crime committee, and each one of those committees had set goals and began to make investments. But over time, the committee structure dissipated because we all kind of became everybody knew what everybody was supposed to do. Anybody who wasn't doing the job wasn't in the neighborhood anymore. It was just all the people who were there and getting the work done. And everybody was a phone call away. So whenever there was an issue with a child, we'd all be calling each other and saying, okay, this family who's going to help, what can you do? What can you do? So it has moved into more of an environment where everybody knows everybody and takes care of everybody and it is cradle to career. And now we're actually working with the babies and children of the older youth who started in the program 15 years ago. Now they're having children and they're coming up in the pipeline of services. To give a specific example of how we intersect, though, we have replicated the Harlem Children's Zone student advocate model. So student advocate, if you can imagine, perhaps a helicopter mom who once is watching over their child's academic performance very, very strictly and checks their report cards and wants to know how they did on the test yesterday and checks what their homework is and make sure they're doing it. And if they're having bubble in school, they go to the school, they talk to the teachers. And so we have replicated that model and each advocate has about 40 kids on their caseload and they are located at the schools. So they're kind of that link between the family, the community and what's going on in the classroom. Make sure that and their goals are to keep kids on track with their GPA, their grades, their absenteeism, if their absenteeism is issues to address those. And if they need clothes, if they need shoes, if the family has lost their housing and been evicted, all of those kinds of things that destabilize a child's life to help work through those things to keep the child stable and on track in school and then to make sure that the child moves to the next grade level every year. So that's sort of an example of how two entities, city government staff and school, a school intersect with each other to collaborate to get the job done. I hope I answered your question. You certainly did. And yeah, the home children's own concept has been around for I would think about maybe 20 years. And it's good to see it's really having its grounded in communities across the country and to see it work. And so it's a real very positive step. And Lavonda, one of your responsibilities is working with staff from professional development and professional learning opportunities. So now we talked a little bit about that philosophy of working with the family, the whole child and the culture that needs to be established in these settings that would require a little bit of buying and understanding of all staff members to be part of it. What kind of advice can you give us in how you can get professional learning to a point where there's a very strong understanding among staff, no matter what responsibilities they have, to feel themselves being part of it and play a role in this collective impact on families and children? Yeah, that's a great question. What I want to lift up because the nature of our work again is around trauma-informed practices and building resilience. We first started really diagnosed where trauma sits and how it's connected to the work. And what we know is by the age of six, children that have experienced at least one trauma, by the time children and youth become age 18, they've experienced at least one or more trauma. And then by the time, and that goes from 50% of children experiencing at 18, 67%. And that by time you're an adult, 70% of us in this space right now have experienced at least one trauma or more. So when you start thinking about how do you create a professional development knowing that that sits in the ecosystem and you're working towards healing and unbuilding and rewiring for support, we had to do deep listening to the staff. We couldn't presume that we knew the answers. We couldn't go in there because go into the system and working in professional development until we did deep, deep listening. And because we did deep, deep listening through surveys, through conversations and through dialogue, we were able to do what I call like center-based, you know, it's not center-based, but community design that was emergent from the educators themselves. So we lifted their voice into the work and using the community center design allowed us to then also hold what we call professional learning communities. So we partnered with New Teacher Center, which was part of the funding through the David Lucille Packard Foundation to help us think about not just having a one-time training after we designed around the needs of the educators, but then how do we have the in-between informal conversations that allow them to deepen the strategies that were presented in the trainings itself? Because if you just go to training, the research shows that you'll implement five percent or less without deep coaching and support and being able to reflect with one another as a professional learning community. So I'm so proud to even say that now some of those same educators are now actually leading the trainings, right? And facilitating these professional learning communities and guiding the work. And so if I as an administrator were to continue to just design around what I thought was best, or looked at this piece of literature, or I read this most recent book or visited this, you know, attended this training and just thought I was going to come back and then start implementing, I would have been wrong. And it's one of those programs that would not have taken root. But when you allow the community to design what's best for them because they're in the field, they're in the trenches and they're working and they're face to face with the families, then you get the outcomes that we're getting is that teachers are less likely to want to expel or suspend young children, that they're more likely to want to be a part of our home visiting model, right? And that we have this fabulous kindergarten transition transition manager who's amazing, who's helping us to make deep connections with families and we're holding monthly meetings with families that have a high touch and high a warm approach to our work. And we're, I mean, literally you may call it social work, but if there's a family who needs food and there's a teacher who knows about that because of that trauma-informed lens, they're like, hey, we have this family that's in need, let's call up our office of equity and see what supports we can get them. If they don't have housing, their housing insecure, we're going to wrap you into services that will help you close that loop to the best, to the extent possible. So like similar to what was being shared by Lisa and Katie and Cameron, it's us wrapping our arms around them just not with words, but with actions of support that is tender, that is loving, and then we can get to the learning of our children. But I will tell you honestly before we were planning these professional development opportunities, we, you will miss, you'll continue to miss the effectiveness of implementation. And I can't say that we did that for any period of time. We knew right away that listening was the best approach to doing this, and so we sent your teacher voice and continue to do that, and now they're leading the way and we're providing the infrastructure support around it. That's the essence of continuous quality improvement. If you get to make that cycle with those that are impacted by your policies or practices that you really get to build some strong foundations for relationships and a better understanding or holistic understanding of their particular needs and wants. Katie, you know, you told us that with first 10 you've brought that or integrated that at some point a couple years ago, you know, and you have a type diverse student population, in what way did that kind of enhance or support particular notions of sort of equitable support among the diverse population in your school? Yeah, so the services definitely have shifted a bit prior to us moving in a first 10 approach, which was about four years ago. A team of teachers, administrators, and community partners attended a governor's institute and this little seed was planted and it's been a very organic grassroots kind of implementation for us at Washington that I think was able to happen because of our community school framework that we had already had established. So our original partnerships really focused on the kids we had in front of us and as we looked at data we had realized that our kindergartners who were coming to us and looking at their kindergarten readiness, they were behind even their peers who went to school across town and we really looked at what are we doing and giving these equitable opportunities to kids before they even come to us because what we have is this opportunity gap and we can't wait until they're five years old to start addressing those challenges that our families are facing. So that's kind of where we started and we started with who do we have in front of us? Well we have four-year-olds, we have a Head Start classroom, and we have siblings, right? So we identified who are our kids that we have in front of us that have siblings who are not yet in school and that's where we started targeting some of our support and we began kind of identifying who are those families and then we identified okay what is needed right? So is that getting them connected to early learning centers? Is that workforce development? What is the need and then identify okay now these are the partnerships that we need to go build relationships with in order to bridge some of those gaps? We also looked at having more intentional conversations with the Head Start teachers, the K-4 teachers, our kindergarten teachers both from a social and emotional lens but then also from an academic lens so that we're speaking some common language and working on starting a transition plan with who we have in front of us. We don't have any early learning centers in our neighborhood so really trying to find out where our Kith and Kin centers, right? So where are the families taking care of family members or the neighbors and things like that? That's been one of our bigger challenges. We've connected with local after-school programs so that they're speaking the same academic language when they're providing homework support. We are a PBIS district, we partner with the local turkey hills or the the sheets or the Wawa's or whatever your convenience store is and when they see the kids being responsible, respectful and safe they're getting their little tickets and acknowledged at community centers and that's with our four-year-olds and our younger learners. A big component that we also implemented at Washington was a caregiver leadership group and really empowering our parents and again we targeted our parents of our youngest learners and we really kind of let them guide the ship so they've done some child development studies and learning about different milestones that their kids were going through or going to hit and then they ended up creating stations at some of our plan learns that we host on Saturdays monthly for children ages one to eight so they were running stations and they were engaging other parents in the work too and really empowering and really using our parents as leaders as well in our community. In addition to expanding our partnerships to reaching our students who are not yet students, we really intentionally created a first-hand plan and we were really strategic in aligning it to our district strategic goals as well as our school improvement plan so everything that we are doing within this first-hand realm we have goals in literacy we have goals in social and emotional learning we have goals in our comprehensive service delivery is then aligned to our school improvement plan and then again aligned to our district priorities so really making sure that everything is cohesive and aligned so that we're really kind of supporting all areas in all aspects. Thanks for mentioning that I think that coherence aspect is such a big element to a pre-kindergarten to grade three alignment and I think you laid it out just beautifully in how that works although somebody was wondering about PBIS it's not a public radio station right? No no positive behavior support oh I always get that I think it's interventions if I remember correctly it's intervention services yes very good so Lisa and Lavanda for you you know the the pandemic has really exposed so many inequities for families and young children so which one of these inequities stood out for you and how or you know touched you and then how would you address it after the pandemic is over is there something that you want to hold on to that is so important and critical that you would like to address now and later once the pandemic is over oh my goodness this is um I'll go first Lisa if you're okay with that this is huge the one that touched me the most and still makes me get a little choked up is the digital divide and we sort of knew about the digital divide but we didn't know I think to the extent that it's always been with us and how it is now and when we went we turned completely to virtual learning online learning the the number of students without a device or internet access it just blew me away and even though I'm even a person who came from deep level poverty I don't think sometime even as you've moved away from it the closest to it you realize how inequitable it is um and prevalent it is among our families and I mean I some of the things that I will coming up with was just out of honestly pure ignorance I was like well what can they do this can they do that no and we had families who were literally getting online with their kiddos using a phone and that one phone might be the might be the only device for the household so imagine that or if there was a device in a home such a laptop or desktop that there might be multiple siblings who also need that device or say they all have a device but again there's multiple users in the home and they can't increase their internet capability so something that to me should just be a norm in one's home wasn't right and so the way we have worked around it and we will continue to work around it post pandemic is that we worked with some of our amazing founders and foundations and of course with our school district and made it very apparent and they knew it because they are also on the upper grade levels we're facing similar problems and you have to you know in early learning sometime folks will say hey those are just the little guys right you know oh they don't really you know they should probably be online as much well no matter if they're only spending five to ten to fifteen minutes of time or longer plugging into virtual learning that's an important part of their educational journey right now and when they don't have access to do that the disposition that it plays on the families to feel like they're inadequate like right so you talk about trauma these traumas are perpetuated I can't meet the needs of my child because I don't I'm not well resourced with this something now consider a basic resource in the home called internet and a laptop or device and so that's we've now gotten devices in all of our children's homes which is is a blessing but we are still having some challenges around internet accessibility so we worked with organizations like Comcast and this internet provider and T-Mobile that has been supportive or low cost or free cost but then it's still about bandwidth or how much information are you asking from me to sign up for this free or low cost service and if I'm a family who happened to be a family of immigrant status and there's some some social political connotation around that I may not be willing to share personal information to get that at the expense that you know folks want to come and deploy and detain me so like we have a high about 70 to 80 percent of our population of children are Latinx so and that doesn't mean just because they're Latinx that that implies you know the other but that the concern is we're in a community where and then we're in the time in our lives right now where that's an issue right and so trying to figure out how to navigate around that and we also have families who are Chinese back on Arabic background and we Oakland is a very diverse community but it continues to be a thing and we we've even gotten hot spots into our family's homes so and I don't know if you guys know how much that cost but it can cost anywhere on average you know to 200 to 300 dollars right and and the lifetime of a hot spot so that's just I don't know what Lisa's going to share but my goodness like that should be a basic resource in every family's home yeah you're absolutely right and this is a big area that needs to be addressed obviously and it's so unfair just the way it played out Lisa what is your most important area I would say you know all of the above but I have to you know I would second what Luanda says and just say that the level of inequity in our country with or without COVID is unacceptable it is not what we stand for as a nation you know has COVID sort of shined more light for people who didn't know about it so that they now see about things like what Luanda talked about or the fact that that parents don't have health insurance and they get sick and now they're they either don't go to the hospital or they're stuck with some kind of crazy bill that they'll never be able to afford so I could go on and on but what I I feel most proud of and you can hear it in what Luanda said and I'm sure my other colleagues is how much people who really care and are in this work for the right reasons are down in the neighborhood finding solutions to these issues so you know getting out there and getting mobile devices in people's hands pivoting quickly the way you do business because the way we did business before we have to change everything so how was it that we were going to be able to bring kids back into our facilities after school programs and schools okay what do we have to do what cleaning supplies do we have to get what policies and you know contact tracing and all kinds of things you have to put into effect because we have to get the kids back into school or into after school programs um opening up learning pods we opened up learning pods so that kids didn't matter if you don't have money so your parents can't pay for a teacher to teach your little group at home you can come for free to our learning pods you can log on right there we'll have staff there that are going to help you navigate through the technological issues you're going to have with the computer sending staff out to do wellness checks to people's homes they bring masks they bring sanitize they brought toilet paper in the early days finding out how people were doing making sure that their needs were being met and when the cares act came out and people could apply for money helping them fill out whatever forms they had to do so they could get their $1,200 check or $1,500 check um we had uh kids older youth hanging out outside of a neighborhood center with no supervision getting into trouble they were supposed to be in school logging on to their classroom work sending staff out there to begin to engage them bring them in get them inside the facility even though the facility was technically closed so they could log on bring their computers feed them and make sure they got caught back up with their homework and the silver lining of it all we actually hired a lot of youth and use them as a clean team deploying them to city neighborhood centers all over the city because we had to ratchet up our cleaning every day to deal with COVID issues so creating jobs out of this to help address it so I just want to say you have to be creative you have to think about the needs of the neighborhood and do whatever it takes and be ready to pivot on a dime because COVID changed everything and uh you have to get ready and respond yeah that's all I have thank you yeah that that makes perfect sense and the pivoting is still going on you're still not quite through it yet and so Katie and Cameron that's probably right on your mind you know as you sort of go through the school year this is going to be a very did un atypical school you obviously and so but what I wanted to get at is you know your approach to a birth to grade five community based approach to teaching and learning and supporting the families along the way making these community connection requires a particular culture within your school what can you tell the audience that's on the webinar what did you find to be sort of a very critical essential element in creating this this culture among your staff and for communities to to respond to it positively let's start with Cameron sure thank you um one of the biggest things for the culture has to be the relationships that are formed by the adults that are caring for the children and so I am very fortunate to work with a lot of people within the community the school system and the Judy Hoyer Center who have relationships at the forefront of their mind and it's not just relationships with school staff and community staff it is relationships with parents it's relationships with children it is the culture of positivity and that if they say it can't be done we actually find a way to do it I think that when we look at this holistically from COVID pre-current or post we look at the structures that we have in place with those relationships we have people who provide case management support for our students with disabilities before they could ever be identified under a technical label they are out there trying to put them through child find opportunities psychological support case management updates on a monthly basis so that we can see what is necessary to build and I think this is critical as a metaphor that foundation for a building starts at the early childhood ages and birth to age four or five and with them out working to help provide case management food and necessities that relationship starts with the family we currently will have a baby shower for our expectant mothers and that starts that relationship with them from womb to age five and it's so critical when we talk about what is it that we see were weaknesses or challenges that we can bust through technology absolutely being able to educate them our Judy Hoyer center partnered with our early childhood office for the summer between March 13th when we closed down and August 31st when we opened back up to provide extended learning opportunities and they put iPads out in the hands of all the children they gave them the extended learning over the summer so that we didn't have any bigger gap than what we might have already been experiencing when you put that together it's not about the work it's about the love and so this whole partnership whether it's public or private is a work of heart and I think relationships are critical to that well said Cameron Katie what's your perspective on yeah I'm glad Cameron talked about relationships it's a thread that we talk about deeply and and almost every day at our building here in Lancaster I think I want to add on to that to speak a little bit about buy-in when you might have some resistors I think you in talking to a K to five building and you talk about the importance of early childhood education even before school those are those are the early adopters right they get it they understand it you're not speaking a foreign language you talk to some of your maybe intermediate teachers and I was one of them so I was I was that descender at one point of time of why is this important I'm the tested grade right so my energy should be in my tested grade we're already behind we gotta load our resources there but when you can ground it in data when you can ground it in research and you can make the connections of if we invest now it's going to help you it's going to make your life easier your job easier your connections easier because we're putting in the time and the efforts to build the relationships and put the supports in place so when they they're up with you that that gap is not as as prevalent I think the other side of the coin is also funding right our budgets are tight they're getting cut every year and and now I'm asking for funding for kids who are not yet in my building right so how can I say I'd like to I'd like this program or this partnership and but they're for two year olds and and they're not our kids they're not our kids yet and I think that's super critical that we're investing in what our students need before they get to us and if they're not coming to my school they're coming to somebody's school right and this is not about my school or your school it's what are we doing for all of our kids so that that gap and that opportunity gap is less and I wholeheartedly believe in that and I really I'm super passionate about it now as a former fifth grade teacher but but I really need people to realize that that that's so critical that we're investing before they get to us because I don't care whose school they go to we're helping the child thank you great insights and now we have 15 minutes left for some questions that quite a few of them that came in and they are directed to specific panelists so I'll start with Lisa here what is the proxy for you use what is the proxy you use for high quality it's a standard tool that's used by our early learning coalition the state of Florida every county has an entity that is overall early learning and so there are guidelines I can't remember it's a standard you go into a child care center and do a review of the quality of care whether that be the physical facilities the training of the staff and all that stuff so it's you know I'm sorry I can't give you the name of the tool that's used but it is that standard gold seal standard that every child care center in the state of Florida and in in our county is measured on and this is something we can certainly follow up on and get that for you absolutely happy to do that sent that out with the recording there was a question about somebody wants to to hear about how parent voice is used in determining the services within your school settings and we heard a little bit about that from Lavanda is there somebody else who would like to speak to that piece how parent voice is used in determining the services is there I can speak a little bit about how that looks at Washington we have a community school director whose role is pretty much like a liaison between our partnerships and and our neighborhood and and our school and one of her jobs and one of her roles is really to help with our team conduct a needs assessment and part of that includes talking and getting feedback from our families about what's going on in the neighborhood and different pieces and then we utilize that as far as deepening partnerships maybe not renewing partnerships creating new partnerships that type of thing I spoke a little bit about our parent leadership group we have monthly parent workshops and it goes back to what Cameron was talking about with relationships and and just having those dialogues and listening like Lavanda said truly listening and listening to listen listen not to respond we used to do neighborhood walks unfortunately with with COVID that's something that we haven't been able to do but you know we'd be walking down the street and we'll have conversations on the stoop or out the apartment windows or or you know oh you know I see Mr. Torres down the street that's our dean of students right they they flock out so really having those conversations and it's really so we have that needs assessment and then we have that the relational anecdotal that kind of drives some of the decision making at our school I left it I really like the the anecdotal part you know in the community and get the information more informally Cameron there's a question for you what measurement were you using for kindergarten readiness we have an assessment that is called the KRA which is a kindergarten readiness assessment and the window for that opens at the first day of school where students are able to take that to determine as a predictor how ready they are for kindergarten that window usually extends through the end of October on an annual basis and then we measure the different domains from math and language against the scores from previous years which tells us what our growth is but it really is anticipated to be at the beginning of the year where students don't have an opportunity to be taught all year to see how ready they are for that first official grade of school thank you can one of you speak more specifically about the mental health services that are provided for students and families and I think we heard from Lavanda the trauma-informed care aspect of it somebody else could some either Lisa or Cameron and Katie could you speak to the mental health services in your program some schools I'll speak to it and by the way I while I was off I looked up what what tool we use to measure quality of care and it's the early childhood environmental rating scale ECERS okay and ITERS which is another one so both of those but this is a very important need I can't say enough and I really appreciate the work that Luanda is doing in Oakland because the amount of trauma and I talked a little bit earlier about the surveys we did of families and that 32 percent of children were reported to have lost a parent through either incarceration or death over the past year there is a lot of violence in the community a lot of family instability a lot of families parents being carted off to jail and and even the older youth you know getting into trouble and going going to jail and those kinds of things there's a lot of trauma and it deeply impacts the community and unfortunately you know I it is very difficult to get appropriate services because mental health services typically are very much following the medical model which means you have to have insurance you have to get referred to a psychologist or a mental a licensed mental health counselor you have to get a diagnosis you have to come back you know again and a lot of the ability to respond to mental health trauma has to be organic within the environment that a child lives in not in this sort of very structured medical model type of world so we've worked very hard to train all of our staff in what we call mental health first aid the trauma-informed care learning how to identify when behaviors of children are not because the child is acting out but because the child is responding to things in their own life that they're they're suffering trauma from and then embedding actual licensed mental health staff among our staff so that kids don't even know that they're working the people they're seeing every day and who are working with them on the streets actually are licensed mental health workers so they don't have to go into a very structured mental health system it becomes an organic part of the work they're doing every day with staff so I hope that helps I know it's it can be rather expensive and we're not completely there yet but it's work that is constantly underway in Orlando okay thanks there's a follow-up question for Lavander and that is about the digital divide somebody's wondering if the partnership has plans for addressing digital inequity which goes beyond just access to technology and looks at the use of technology oh my goodness you're right there so actually you know this is interesting we our own educators who are very seasoned I like to say season and age and veteran teachers who have different dispositions to technology have and is grappling with the use of technology itself and so what we had to do was incorporate what we call tech Tuesdays and we did as a whole group experience is just learning to use technology in this new space but then we realize we need to sort of just aggregate that group into unique groups we're like beginning intermediate and advanced because we're a different place with our technology now you turn to families we're starting to notice that same thing right this is just across our community and so we just actually had our last family meeting we have our amazing kindergarten transition manager Maria Suho I don't know if she's on with us but she's amazing and so we're starting to notice that our own families are having some some some challenges with that so we're hoping to start thinking about working maybe with our office of equity um maybe even considering working with some of our teachers who are a little more skilled um and seeing what we can do to start offering um tech support to our families what that will look like one that when that will come hopefully sooner than later we haven't like landed all out and I'm starting to talking organically but it's a noticing and if the families are struggling getting on then I mean it's just you know obvious how are they going to support their children so we need to think about that but the other part is are there other ways that we can also dial back some of the technology right so we can help families utilize it and maybe there's other ways that we can support families by not having everything so so everything going through like technology right there's other ways to do things when when we first hit the pandemic we emailed out learning packets well that can get costly but what I will say those packets are with the families in the homes to this day and they're still referencing and using it so is there a balance between like a hybrid approach of like a certain amount of dosage and amount of technology built in with some old school old fashioned ways of doing things like those things work you know it really did work and so can we blend that can we blend a balance of the past and the present and the future so and I'm just thinking out loud but that's our Eastern Leadership Team and OUSD is starting to percolate that just a little bit yeah great there's a question that I find very much was sort of what I've observed in March and in April in our community is when all the playgrounds were closed when these young kids didn't have an opportunity to meet each other it must have been a real huge big question mark for these kids not quite understanding what was going on so how have you addressed the space for parents to engage with play and learn just the simple getting together kids having opportunities how did that play out who would like to go first on that one provide the space for parents to engage with play and learn I would love to know the answer to this so we had play and learns and we had we called them unplugging plays it's very much an unstructured open gym type of environment monthly for our families and neighborhood families as well and we have some really restrict but we have restrictions on what we are allowed to do in our building and who's allowed to come in and for good reason for good reason so we are still struggling on how to create those spaces for our families we just brought our elementary students back about three weeks ago in a phase blended approach and just this week we just now pivoted again and after Thanksgiving we're going back to virtual so there again is less touch points we are we're going to try a digital play and learn in December via zoom where we are giving little like at home materials and we're going to encourage families to sign on on zoom and we'll put them in breakout rooms based on their ages so there's community and if they don't sign on they at least have the materials and they at least have these activities they can do with their families at home so definitely an area where we're trying to think creatively and would be would love to hear what else is going around the country if time for one more comment I'll add on to that thank you Katie those ideas as well we we did things virtually one of the biggest things was trying to distribute the technology to the community so we we hosted distribution days and took the the technological devices that we had and signed them out to the students and then we were able to host social emotional learning opportunities for them we took some of our money and reallocated in our budget so that we could get the supplies to them for arts and crafts and then just being able to have them see each other and interact with within a window such as what we're looking at here today but they could see their friends and they could make a common type of art or craft and then bringing in instructional consultants that could help with that in a virtual field trip type of opportunity is how we address some of the learn and play and the family engagement part because it was great to see the parents working with the students in their own houses while they're interacting with their friends on the technology thank you unfortunately we come to the end of the webinar now and I do want to really thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to be part of this and tell us about your story I think it's been very insightful we've learned a lot and I think for many of you it's been sort of just a very strange but an also challenging but maybe an accelerating kind of experience all in one as you were going through this through this pandemic and especially during working this whole child approach even then you know under these very challenging conditions we have quite a bit of chat going on and it's good and that's going to be captured when we send the recording and we have additional questions that we didn't get to so what I suggest is that we're going to send them to you you can then respond to them and then we can pass it on to those that registered for this webinar I think that would be a way for them to get back the information that they're looking for so finally we have one more slide that we want to look at and I want to remind everybody as it comes up that we have our next and third webinar scheduled for December 3rd at four o'clock again so here's a way to stay in touch New America again we thank you for hosting these events and we wish you all a wonderful rest of the day and a wonderful weekend and holidays take care