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Chapter 1
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Audio Transcript Auto-generated

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    My name is Stephanie Carvey and I'm going

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    to be explaining some systemic issues in early childhood

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    education using our model system from saplings a totally

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    made up center for totally made up Children.

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    The first thing I want to focus on is

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    the whole point of early child early childhood education,

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    which I will refer to as E.

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    C. E. Moving forward and a couple of things to note.

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    We have to talk about capacity,

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    which refers to the most amount of Children permitted

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    to be at the center for licensing purposes.

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    We have to talk about ratio which is required per regulations.

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    It's best practice and it helps teachers provide the best care for students.

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    And we also have to talk about why kids leave and most of the

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    time we hope it's the age out of the program and go to kindergarten.

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    Sometimes families move and sometimes there's just

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    a high cost of care for families.

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    There's also within the boundaries of the center,

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    there's inconsistent or low quality staff and lots of closures due to staffing

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    and staffing has a lot to do with child enrollment.

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    When we talk about staffing, we talk about their experience in E. C. E.

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    The less experience they have means the more training time they need

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    and they need education to be qualified.

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    They must have a high school diploma preference for college level education,

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    but either way, they must be willing to continue education,

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    which we call professional development.

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    Why do staff leave

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    variety of reasons from poor work habits,

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    which leads to termination to poor administration,

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    which means no time to plan or meet with mentor support staff or anybody families,

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    poor management in general or the overall low

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    pay and benefits that come with this job

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    staffing is where the problem mostly lays

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    as staff retention is causing child enrollment

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    to decrease and that's a terrible negative impact for teachers leaving the field.

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    They might ask if it's them,

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    they might leave because they realize this isn't the right profession.

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    They don't want a complete professional development,

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    especially at a secondary level.

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    They don't like kids, it's very mentally and physically challenging and as noted,

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    low pay and low benefits.

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    Most of the time though,

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    I find it's due to the program staff leave

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    because they feel unsupported by the center or the agency

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    and there's lots of ways to fix the problem and some solutions I

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    have thought about come into little packages one immediate and longer term,

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    which is more impactful in the short term now we could try setting

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    and maintaining goals and expectations upon

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    hire and following up and evaluating regularly

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    consistent regular meetings with staff,

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    individual and group to check on all the things.

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    We could use feedback from staff to continuously improve approaches to training,

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    professional development and staff support.

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    Overall the big picture includes hiring more staff because

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    with more staff means we have more planning time,

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    more mentor mentee time, more time for families, etcetera,

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    more staff creates an environment of solutions and when

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    we implement those solutions into a new model,

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    we see some new reinforcing feedback loops,

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    which start with staffing and create better quality of

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    care to keep our total child enrolment high.

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    It also creates some balancing feedback loops, with staff staying at the center,

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    decreasing retention and not having to worry about hiring people all of the time.

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    There's also because of the increased staffing, however,

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    there is a high cost to that and we need to figure out where to get that funding.

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    Thank you.