Family Engagement

Getting Started with First 10: Community Partnerships, School Hubs, and Work Currently Underway (Post #3)

York City prekindergarten teacher, Allie Feaser, sharing York’s new city-wide transition to kindergarten child information form with prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers at the First 10 Summer Institute in August, 2021. Allie spearheaded the creation of the form working with prekindergarten principal Julie Fabie and the First 10 Transition to Kindergarten team.

The second post in this series showed how First 10 partnerships are funded, how they are advancing equity by using this funding to support urban and rural communities with significant low-income populations, and how some partnerships are combining First 10 with anti-racism efforts. In this post, I discuss how communities get started with First 10. I describe the two structures—community-wide partnerships and school-based hubs—First 10 partnerships employ to carry out their work, how they form teams, and how they begin their planning efforts.

Community-wide and School-based First 10 Structures, Sometimes in Combination

The First 10 initiative in York City, PA is a good example of a comprehensive First 10 community partnership (see Figure 1 below). York City is a district of approximately 6100 students, 91% are students of color, and 95% are low-income. The First 10 initiative spans the entire city. First 10 is overseen by a steering committee that includes a board member/parent representative and senior leaders from the district, several early childhood programs, the library, local funders, and other nonprofit organizations. York is forming a family advisory committee to allow for more direct community representation, and importantly, the school district is pairing its First 10 work with a major racial equity and cultural competence training push. At the beginning of the pandemic it established several First 10 teams to carry out a number of strategies that impact the entire community:

Alabama Launches a New Transition to Kindergarten Toolkit

Alabama launched its new Transition to Kindergarten Toolkit in December. We have really appreciated the opportunity to partner with Alabama on this important resource. Congrats to Secretary Barbara Cooper (Department of Early Childhood Education), her team, and her colleagues in other agencies. Alabama asks me to convey its thanks to the Rhode Island Department of Education for inspiring the basic idea of this toolkit.

States and counties may get ideas they can adapt from the toolkit, and communities will find helpful guidance materials in sections 2-9.

The focus of the toolkit is on supporting local communities in developing and implementing effective transition to kindergarten plans. Here are a few highlights that may be of interest:

New Webinar Series: How School and Communities can Serve the Whole Child

Save the Dates. Such great work happening all around the country. We have lined up four engaging panels of fantastic leaders to share their expertise and experience. Our theme: Advancing equity through comprehensive approaches that address teaching and learning, deep family engagement, health and social service supports, and continuous improvement.

Excited to be working with terrific partners at AASA (The Superintendents Association), NAESP, CCSSO, New America, and the Early Childhood State Specialists in State Departments of Education to organize this event. Stay tuned for registration information.

Education Week Reviews the All Children Learn and Thrive Study

District Dossier 2019-06-11 110837

Education Week’s Christina Samuels begins her review of the All Children Learn and Thrive study as follows below. I appreciate that she highlights several examples from the study. While the Executive Summary provides the key findings and proposes a theory of action, see the Full Report for numerous case studies and a fuller explanation of the theory of action in the Conclusion. You can click on specific case studies in the table of contents, including ones on Multnomah County, OR, Greater Omaha, NE, the Cherry Park and Earl Boyles Elementary Schools, Normal, IL, and Boston and Cambridge, MA.

From How Schools, Districts, and Communities Are Joining Forces to Bolster Early Learning:

“A common complaint in the early-childhood field is that several different entities exist to support young children and their families, but those organizations often don’t work together.

But in a number of communities across the country, schools, districts, and early-childhood providers have come together to dismantle those organizational silos.

For example, Cherry Park Elementary School in Portland, Ore., a part of the 9,700-student David Douglas district, runs a summer kindergarten transition program to prepare young students for school, supports a home-visiting program, operates a food bank, and offers cooking classes and financial literacy programs.

Another example: the city of Cambridge, Mass., established a birth-to-3rd grade partnership that includes representatives from the 7,000-student Cambridge district, as well as early-childhood and community-health providers. The partnership there includes creating home visiting and play-and-learn groups for infants, toddlers and their parents; working to boost the quality of family child-care providers; and providing coaching in early literacy, math, and science for the district’s prekindergarten and early-elementary teachers.

Those efforts and many more are catalogued in the report “All Children Learn and Thrive: Building First 10 Schools and Communities” by David Jacobson, released earlier this spring. Jacobson, a principal technical adviser for the Education Development Center, said he was particularly interested in capturing work that is blending academic support for the first decade of a child’s life, along with programs that also help parents and caregivers ….”

Video Recording: New America Panel on the First 10 Years

In case you missed it, here is the video recording of the April 30 New America panel event on my new study. The study, All Children Learn and Thrive: Building First 10 Schools and Communities, examines partnerships between school districts and communities to improve teaching, learning, and care throughout the first decade of children’s lives.

I provide a 20-minute overview of the First 10 approach and my major findings beginning at the 5:35 time mark. Then Education Week’s Christina Samuels does a great job moderating two panel discussions: the first with Deborah Stipek of Stanford and Kwesi Rollins of the Institute for Educational Leadership and the second with leaders of innovative First 10 projects in Omaha, NE, Multnomah County, OR, and Cambridge, MA.

Panel #1 discusses the implications of First 10 initiatives for building community systems that support young children and their families, how First 10 initiatives can strengthen developmentally appropriate practice, the challenge of sustaining ambitious initiatives, and the role of states in supporting this work.

Then in panel #2, Ms. Samuels talks with Brooke Chilton-Timmons, Cris Lopez Anderson, and Lei-Anne Ellis about their experiences leading First 10 initiatives. Topics include:

The role of play-and-learn groups
Improving teaching and learning in kindergarten through 3rd grade classrooms
Addressing the needs of culturally-specific groups
Community-wide quality improvement initiatives
Garnering principal buy-in
Governing First 10 Community Partnerships

Many thanks to Laura Bornfreund and New America for hosting the panel, to Christina Samuels and the panelists for their participation, and to the Heising-Simons Foundation for supporting this research.

New Study, New Name: Introducing First 10

The P-3 Learning Hub is changing its name. We are now called First 10.

For the past two years I have been working on a study funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation. The study investigates community initiatives that combine improving teaching and learning in the early grades with strong family partnerships and comprehensive services—all underpinned by a deep commitment to educational equity. The study provided a great opportunity to talk with community leaders in 18 communities throughout the country and conduct site visits to six of them. The innovative work these communities are doing is inspiring.

My experience learning about these communities has convinced me that we need a new name for this powerful combination of strategies. Further, the name needs to communicate the importance of collaboration between school districts, elementary schools, and other early childhood organizations and programs. As I explain here, I follow Arthur Reynolds and Judy Temple in defining early childhood as roughly the first decade of life, and with this in mind I call these important community initiatives First 10 Schools and Communities.

The study will be released on April 30 at a live-streamed panel event at New America in Washington, DC. (I will post the invitation to the event next.)

The report includes 7 key findings regarding First 10 initiatives. Informed by the experiences of the communities I profile in the study, I propose a new theory of action that outlines the roles that First 10 Schools and Communities can play to improve teaching, learning, and care in the first decade of children’s lives.

Moving forward, this website and the related research and technical assistance projects my colleagues and I do will focus on supporting First 10 initiatives. (And by the way, the url you have been using will continue to work, but our primary domain is now first10.org.)

How a School-Based Early-Learning Program Boosted Later College Attendance (Ed Week)

“Preschool may be be good at offering short-term academic gains for kids, but a program that provided services starting at preschool through 3rd grade showed benefits for children that boosted their college attendance rates years later, according to a new study.

Researchers examined the life outcomes of nearly 1,000 children who attended the Chicago Child-Parent Centers as preschoolers in the early 1980s. On average, children who attended the program completed more years of education than a control group of children. And those effects were amplified the longer that they remained in the program.”

https://go.edc.org/29ke

Innovative Communities Support Young Children and their Families

Powerful Convergence

Just out in Kappan magazine:

“In many cities and towns across the United States, elementary schools are forging deeper partnerships with families and community organizations well before children arrive at kindergarten. The aim of this work is to improve children’s experiences and family engagement and support along the entire continuum from prenatal care through grade 3 and beyond.

This potent combination of educational supports and family services is the single best strategy we have to address pernicious opportunity gaps and raise achievement for low-income children. Communities such as Cincinnati, Ohio; Omaha, Neb., and Multnomah County, Ore., are embracing this approach to tackle persistent poverty, family instability, the hollowing out of the middle class, and the demand for a more highly skilled workforce.”

You can find the full article here.

Principles of Effective P-3 Partnerships: Improved Family Engagement Language

I have strengthened the language around family engagement and support in the principles for effective P-3 partnerships and the associated theory of action graphic. You will see that I drew on a consolidated version of the renowned Head Start family and community engagement outcomes, which I think are right on-point and fit well within the context of the P-3 theory of action. Check out the Overview and/or the Full Explanation (a 12-minute read). Many thanks to my EDC colleague, Heidi Rosenberg, for her helpful suggestions.

Also see Melissa Dahlin’s article at New America’s EdCentral: All in the Family: Supporting Students through Family Engagement in ESSA.