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.