In this blog post, Melissa Manning, with contributions from Sarah Bergman, share perspectives from the Educare Learning Network’s Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships Community of Practice on rebuilding and recovery post COVID-19. Including, specific thoughts on equitable access to high-quality early care and learning and the need for viewing early childhood systems through a racial equity lens.

In mid-June, after early learning settings were initially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, 12 early learning practitioners from seven states gathered virtually for a Build It Back Better dialogue. The dialogue took place during a meeting of the Educare Learning Network’s Community of Practice for Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership grantees and included leaders of Educare schools and child care providers. Below is a summary of what these leaders in the early childhood field shared about their experience with rebuilding and recovery post-COVID-19:

1. What are some of the hopes, dreams and goals for children that were shared during your Build It Back Better dialogue?

A hope is to provide children with the same educational opportunities as children in more affluent communities, as well as resourcing teachers to support their implementation of best practices in service of children’s school readiness and their own personal growth. We hope that all children will have the opportunity to reach their full potential and want to be mindful of what is needed for staff, communities and families to ensure children have those opportunities. We hope that a young child’s family income, race and/or adverse experiences do not predict their later success. Finally, when we see our kids, especially our Black and Latino kids, we want to be able to give them a fair shake in a world we know is not set up for them currently. Kids in our community who came to our programs are no longer living because of street and police violence. There is hopefulness to see changes to systemic racism in our lifetime.

2. What are some of the worries or concerns for children that were shared? What is keeping people up at night?
Children of color are growing up in a society with a long history of structural, institutionalized racism. So many kids are not in quality programs right now as programs start to reopen in limited capacities. We worry about the domestic and child abuse that might be going unreported right now. We are also worried about the social and emotional development and relationship-based work at every level – including physical contact especially with younger children.

Everything we know about child development is seemingly unavailable during this pandemic. We are worried about what the child care landscape is really going to look like for families. There was a teacher who tested positive the night before school was scheduled to reopen. The Remind app was then used to notify parents of a delayed reopening date. There were 55 families who were scheduled to arrive. Four families did not get the information – one uncle even tried to drop off a little girl, who got so upset that school was not open that day. This incident was a reminder that these kids are at home with family members and wanting to come back. Our kids need these environments. In some cases, we are their stability – their constant.

3. According to participants, how did the supports for young children and families respond or fare? Who has been disproportionately impacted by the challenges?
A positive has been that there was some security built in for families through child care subsidies. There was no parent fee, and slots were saved. Another positive has been smaller group sizes. Adults have time to build relationships with each other and kids.

Some negatives? It is up to states to figure out where their money lands, and that really varies. Also, funding that came through in grant form was insufficient in many cases. Head Start and child care in Illinois are not on the same page, and many programs could not open as emergency care because of the loopholes and discrepancies in policies and procedures. The longer a program stays closed, the harder it is to reopen. The Black Lives Matter movement has had a significant impact on the Educare Seattle community. For equity and racial justice to be a part of what we do, we must understand how white privilege plays out in the child care setting.

4. With respect to concerns or challenges shared, what did participants say has or would help alleviate these issues or make things better?
It would be helpful if different sub-systems were firmly aligned and communicating clear expectations. The conversation should also be raised between public school leaders and local child care providers. Providers want to be responsive to school decisions in order to best serve the community. We are still concerned, though, about how do we partner with families to empower themselves as the most important teacher for their child, while also meeting the need for child care and education? Some families are not quite ready to return on-site, but also not quite comfortable being their child’s teacher.

We want to make sure we are supporting families’ mental health situations and ensuring families have access to services and affordable technology. In order to make things better, we need to be able to manage movement effectively in case someone tests positive for COVID-19. Tulsa Educare was operating 7 a.m. – 6 p.m., and to make it work, there were so many substitutes, interns and aides required. So many folks going in and out. They’ve adjusted, so that now, there are three teachers with children all day. It is so calm. That is a solution that children will really benefit from.

5. As we work together to rebuild the early childhood system, what questions should we all be asking to ensure that ALL young children and families thrive?

We need to ask ourselves: what is it we really want? We need to slow down and have dialogues about this. What is it we want our children to experience? What kind of citizens do we want them to become? What is the role of profit in our child care industry? How can we cultivate more respect for teachers, especially our birth-to-age 5 teachers? Who do we want to be taking over this world? What skills do they need? And of course, in each conversation, we need to ask ourselves, how are the children?

To learn more about how Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership grantees have faced the COVID-19 pandemic and what policy recommendations they have made, please read the Educare Learning Network’s blog series “A Path to High-Quality Child Care through Partnerships.”

Build It Back Better is a project of Start Early (formerly the Ounce) focused on identifying the critical questions that early childhood systems and services must ask as we rebuild after the COVID-19 pandemic. The writings that emerge from the initiative center the experiences and voices of those most directly and disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s impact on early care and learning. Join the conversation at the Early Child Connector’s Recovery and Rebuilding Hub.

Melissa Manning is the Early Childhood Services Training and Professional Development Coordinator at Sunbeam Family Services and Co-Chair of the Educare Learning Network’s Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships Community of Practice. Melissa has been in the field of early childhood education for three decades in a variety of capacities including, Infant/Toddler teacher, Center Director, Health Services Manager, Program Operations Manager, Quality Assessor and her current role as Training & Professional Development Coordinator for Sunbeam Family Services’ Early Childhood department. Melissa has worked with Head Start programs since 2002 and has extensive knowledge about Head Start Program Performance Standards, nonprofit management and best practices in the field.

Sarah Bergman was the Leadership and Educational Equity Fellow at Start Early this past summer. Sarah has her Master’s in Early Childhood Education from Erikson Institute and is a Chicago Public Schools teacher. Sarah’s interests are focused on bringing developmentally appropriate teaching practices to all primary aged students and connecting the dots between policy decisions and everyday life in the classroom.

In the last three decades, scientific research has demonstrated how deeply adversity in childhood becomes embedded into biology, behavior, and risk, and how these can be passed on to future generations. This body of science — Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), and Resilience research, or NEAR — is one of the largest public health discoveries of our time.

Home visitors knowledgeable about the NEAR sciences and research are interested in bringing this information to families but worry about causing harm. The NEAR@Home toolkit addresses these concerns and provides strategies for engaging parents in discussing NEAR sciences and using the ACEs questionnaire in a safe, respectful and effective way for both home visitor and family.

Home visitors are uniquely positioned to help families mitigate the effects of past, present, and future adversity through supporting protective, responsive parenting and safe attachment relationships. The NEAR@Home process gives parents choice, offering information, assuring safety, being respectful, allowing time and space for reflection, and by always closing with hope and resilience.

The NEAR@Home toolkit was created, tested, and revised by home visitors, mental health providers, and other experts in the field of NEAR and home visiting in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. The NEAR@Home toolkit is designed as a training manual with guided processes to help you learn and practice language and strategies to safely and effectively talk about the trauma of ACEs. We emphasize safety and reflective support for the home visitor as a critical element in this process.

The NEAR @Home toolkit was developed as a self-study process and is being shared without cost because we believe that all home visitors deserve to have access to this guidance. Many home visitors discovered that while self-study of the NEAR@Home toolkit was useful, they preferred a supported learning experience and have informed the development of NEAR@Home Facilitated Learning. Learning how to be safe, respectful, and effective while talking about the NEAR sciences with parents is a complex process that requires and deserves time and support.

The NEAR@Home Facilitated Learning process is very different from most training programs. Thinking about, talking about childhood trauma stirs feelings in all of us, whether ACEs are part of our life story or not. Our learning process is guided by Facilitators who are relationship focused, trauma sensitive, and fluent in infant mental health concepts and processes. The Facilitators model self-regulation, co-regulation, spacious listening, and reflective processes to walk with home visitors and supervisors through learning how to do a NEAR home visit. Implementation Science guides the structure of the learning process from a mutual exploration of fit and feasibility to follow up reflective consultation to support home visitors as they integrate these new skills.

Gardening is great way for children to experience nature and science by exploring how things grow and where food comes from while offering opportunities for lessons in math, language, social interactions and cultures.

In this blog, Kristin Bernhard, Start Early senior vice president of policy and advocacy, shares our work towards building back a better early childhood system that addresses and diminishes the inequities that exist for our youngest learners and families.

The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a report card on the status of our society — and not a very flattering one. It has exposed and highlighted the profound inequities, from health care to affordable housing, that exist from coast to coast. We have seen that nearly every aspect of the social safety net is weaker than we had hoped; in particular, the limitations and weaknesses of our country’s early childhood system have been thrown into stark relief.

At the same time, we have been reminded that racism permeates our communities, risking the physical and social-emotional safety and well-being of the children, families and caregivers with whom we work so closely. We have been called upon to renew our collective commitment to racial equity and finally undo generations of institutional racism that continue to traumatically impact children and families.

Now, we have a choice: 1) rebuild the fragile, inequitable early childhood system that was in place prior to the pandemic, 2) or build it back better by collaboratively rethinking and improving early learning and care programs by proactively addressing existing disparities and ensuring that programs meet the needs of children and families. We must work towards the latter.

How?

• By inviting more voices into the conversation about rebuilding and recovery
• By identifying gaps in who is represented in these critical conversations and exploring how we can engage with and learn from more diverse groups of partners
• By centering voices of those most directly and disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s impact and amplifying them to make systemic changes that are responsive to the emergent needs of families and early learning and care programs
• By pairing the lived experiences of minority and historically under-resourced communities with the Start Early’s research, program, advocacy and policy tools — in order to activate the field to demand that policymakers build back better

In order to do this right, we must engage in conversations about building back a better system where race, ethnicity, zip code, socioeconomic status and other related factors do not predict a child’s growth and development or access to resources.

As we continue to see the detrimental impact of the COVID-19 pandemic unfold, we are, however, also witnessing innovation in action through the responses of providers, communities, policymakers, researchers and countless other early childhood stakeholders. For example:

• Teachers and other educators have rapidly learned and implemented new technologies to support at-home learning and family engagement efforts.
• Policy and practice changes have allowed the use of telehealth and other virtual communication tools for home visiting and early intervention services.
• Researchers have sprung into action to document the experiences of families and service providers.
• State administrators have streamlined the procedures for accessing child care subsidies and services.

We must acknowledge, applaud and leverage the flexibility and swift action brought on by the pandemic to inform how we rebuild.

Through the Build It Back Better initiative, Start Early is partnering with early childhood stakeholders from across the country to share their challenges, innovative solutions and ideas about what major questions must be asked and considered during this unprecedented time. It is our goal to collaborate with families, communities and local, state and federal leaders to amplify these critical questions and perspectives to best inform decision-makers’ efforts and respond to the changing needs of children, families and practitioners.

As we examine lessons learned so far from this pandemic, we can recreate the conditions in which inequities persist and worsen in crisis — or we can build it back better, more equitably and more sustainably. Now more than ever, we must underscore that ample investment in early learning and care is essential for addressing and diminishing the inequities that exist for our youngest learners and families.

Recommended for Preschoolers

Materials Needed:

• Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert
• A pencil, crayon, pen or other writing tool, and paper
• Grocery store advertisements and scissors

Developmental Goals: 

• Identify a variety of healthy food options, in this case fruits and vegetables.
• Associate letters with the beginning sounds of words.
• Recognize upper and lower case letters. Categorize produce as either a fruit or a vegetable.

In the Future:

• The more opportunities young children have to explore a variety of foods, the more likely that they will eat a varied and healthy diet as they grow.
• As children build their understanding of letters and the sounds they make, they will begin to piece letters together in invented spelling.
• The ability to categorize objects is a beginning math skill that children will later build upon as they identify the properties of shapes and understand how to complete a pattern.

Activity:

1. Introduce the book to your child.  As with any new book, take time to allow her to explore the book’s pictures on her own before sitting down to read it out loud.
2. As you read the book, invite her to talk about the foods she sees on each page.
3. In addition to simply identifying the fruits and vegetables, talk about which ones she likes, which ones she wants to try, or what recipes you could make with the foods.
4. If your child has shown an interest in the alphabet, invite her to tell you the letters she recognizes.
5. For more letter play, you can encourage her to make connections among the letter sounds and the first letter of the foods on each page.
6. After enjoying the book a few times, invite your child to guess which foods are fruits and which are vegetables. You can extend on this idea by bringing out grocery store advertisements from the newspaper and having her cut out pictures of fruits and vegetables. Once she cuts out the pictures, have her sort them into two piles: a fruit pile and a vegetable pile.
7. You can take this further by having your child create a grocery list of fruits and vegetables by either drawing pictures of the foods, writing letters to represent the beginning sounds of each food, or using invented spelling. At the store, ask your child to look closely for the foods that she put on your list.

As our country has slowly started to reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools and child care centers have been weighing their options when it comes to welcoming students back. Our early childhood center, Educare Chicago, after much careful consideration, made the decision to reopen and eagerly prepared to welcome children, families and educators back earlier this month.

Educare Chicago has been a lifeline to many parents throughout this time. The school serves families from under-resourced communities by providing high-quality child care and resources to their families.

Educare staff support parents as the primary nurturers and educators of their children. That support didn’t stop when the school closed back in March. Educare Chicago teachers and staff have been with parents every step of the way, providing helpful learning resources, spare masks and messages of encouragement.

“I appreciate you all so much for all you do,” another parent said of the support she’s received from the school. We know that these early years of a child’s education are critical to their future success in school. The current health crisis has shown just how important it is for working families to have access to high-quality early learning for their children. Without early childhood centers and schools being open, the families we serve are forced to stay home due to lack of child care and are unable to go to work, making it almost impossible to make ends meet. No parent should have to choose between providing care for their children or losing needed income.

What does back to school look like during COVID-19?

Both Illinois Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lightfoot determined that child care programs could reopen if specific requirements were met prior to accepting students back into the building. The safety of the children, families and educators at Educare Chicago has been paramount to the school’s leadership team and has informed their decision making every step of the way. The school established a Reopening Committee to help plan for the many requirements mandated by the City of Chicago and the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) to reopen their school. Prior to its reopening, the school also submitted a written plan to DCFS.

In accordance with state and city requirements, Educare Chicago resumed center-based school operations on Monday, August 3, and is allowed to serve a limited number of children. Educare Chicago is committed to safely providing comprehensive services for children and families. The school has had to adapt some practices due to the new rules and regulations. Several of the changes that have been put in place to ensure children, families and staff are safe include:

• Screening children and staff daily prior to entry into the school
• Limiting access to children throughout the day
• Increased cleaning and sanitation practices
• Social distancing and wearing of personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff and children over age 2
• Increased square footage of 50 square feet per child
• Excluding children and staff when there is a cough, temperature, diarrhea, rash or any COVID-19 symptoms
• 6 feet of space between cribs and sleeping cots
• Installation of protective barriers
• Updating policies and procedures

What is Educare Chicago?

Educare Chicago was founded in 2000 as an innovative early childhood education program providing comprehensive services to children and families in under-resourced neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. Educare has spawned a national network of 25 schools and has reimagined what it means to educate our earliest learners.

Educare Chicago was founded by Start Early after years of working with children and families in the Grand Boulevard community. The Start Early’s work prior to the opening of Educare Chicago provided critical insight into the Educare Model. Based on four core principles: intensive family engagement, continual professional development, high-quality teaching practices and data utilization, the Educare model has been shown to prepare children for kindergarten in multiple developmental categories.

In this blog post, Start Early (formerly the Ounce) policy analyst Kayla Goldfarb, shares parents’ and caregivers’ perspectives on rebuilding and recovery post COVID-19, including specific thoughts on economic security, community mental health and parent advocacy and engagement.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on families and caregivers has been both broad and deep. The extent of economic, social and physical and mental health consequences, to name a few, is still unfolding, while daily life remains profoundly changed for families with young children at home. Yet, as a group of Educare families shared during a May 2020 Build It Back Better dialogue, despite the challenges presented, critical opportunities exist for the rebuilding of our early childhood system to better adapt to and support the needs and goals of families with young children.

Parents and caregivers continue to be concerned about economic security and the availability of both financial assistance and regulatory protections afforded as part of federal COVID-19 relief. As the broader economic effects of the pandemic have overloaded federal and local safety nets, families with young children who relied on public benefits prior to the health crisis have found it increasingly difficult to access supports and basic needs. For example, families who rely on the SNAP program, shortages at grocery stores and a strain on traditional community support systems like food depositories have created a barrier to receiving benefits. Similarly, for families struggling to pay rent, confusion over the patchwork of federal, state and local eviction-protections and the availability of legal recourse has left some families concerned over whether their landlords can still pressure them to pay rent.

For those enrolled in Medicaid, a lack of access to individual mental health services and other support systems has placed an added burden on the ability of families to cope with COVID-19-related pressures. Likewise, parents continue to be concerned about the developmental impacts and mental health needs of their young children who may not understand the changes to daily life. Reflecting on their current experience with early childhood programs, parents expressed a desire for more extensive community mental health services to attend to the needs of the whole family.

“I would like to see more community group therapy work because it’s not affordable when its one-on-one,” Janelle Jenkins, an Educare Denver parent, said. “There are a lot of families that could just use a boost, pulling out strengths and helping them to realize their potential — that’s all they need to get started and for their family to be successful.”

Additional concerns are top of mind for parents and caregivers as they contemplate the “reopening” of their states and return to work. The disruption of routine child care is particularly concerning for parents in essential sectors, like child care, who must now contend with where their own young children will be when they are required to return to work.

“The safety, financial stability, wondering where I am going to put my children in the event that I have to open up earlier, and they have a different tentative date to open?” Toshiba Davis, an Educare Oklahoma City parent and home child care provider, questioned.

While eager to provide support to families and children in their essential roles, reopening means risking the health and safety of their own families. This added, unique tension for caregivers and educators is exacerbated over uncertainty of what safety measures, including class sizes, PPE and business hours, will be in place when services reopen.

“When I do welcome the families back in, am I putting my own family at risk? Those are the things that worry me,” Toshiba shared.

As data continue to reveal the disproportionate health impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities around the country, we clearly see profound equity issues for the early childhood workforce, which is comprised almost exclusively of women, 40% of whom are people of color.1

Despite these pressing COVID-19 related concerns, parents and caregivers remain focused on the ways in which stronger two-generational supports can more holistically address the needs and desires of families, in times of crisis and beyond.

“In order for our children to have hopes and dreams, parents need to have hopes and dreams,” Toshiba exclaimed. “I would love to see parents in my community get more education, […] so they can be advocates for their own children, because nobody can advocate for your child like you can. But, you’ve got to have the knowledge and the know how to do it.”

Parents and caregivers envision an expanded network of resources outside of the walls of their early learning and care environments, including after school and summer programming and robust math and financial literacy resources, to enable children to reach their potential from their earliest years.

“Financial literacy and education are very important — that’s my hope. It should be in all schools from the time they’re age 0 to 3”, Ealasha Vonner, an Educare Denver parent, said. “That’s my hope and dream because if we did have that in our schools, we would be better off right now.”

Build It Back Better is a project of Start Early focused on identifying the critical questions that early childhood systems and services must ask as we rebuild after the COVID-19 pandemic. The writings that emerge from the initiative center the experiences and voices of those most directly and disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s impact on early care and learning. Join the conversation at the Early Child Connector’s Recovery and Rebuilding Hub.

Kayla Goldfarb is a policy analyst at Start Early, focusing her work primarily on home visiting and providing staffing support to the Home Visiting Task Force, a standing body of the Illinois Early Learning Council. She holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

1 Austin, Lea JE, et al. “Racial Wage Gaps in Early Education Employment.” (2019).
https://cscce.berkeley.edu/files/2020/02/RacialWageGaps-Early-Education-Brief.pdf