Dear Ready Ready Supporter,
As we expand Ready for School, Ready for Life’s work into our next stage, we have identified four community partners to implement the first three of ten strategies we plan for children ages 3-5 and their families.
A design team of community stakeholders developed the strategies and helped identify the first three for piloting and implementation:
- Implement a countywide active reading effort to improve children’s early literacy skills.
- Improve adult and children’s social-emotional development by expanding evidence-based interventions.
- Enhance the pre-K to kindergarten transition.
You can read more about our partners in this newsletter and learn more about the strategy development process on our website. We are excited to begin this work and would like to thank again the nearly 40 members of the design team who have helped us on this journey.
Sincerely,
Charrise Hart
Chief Executive Officer
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Build public will for early childhood priorities
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- Guilford County has awarded $1.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to Ready for School, Ready for Life to expand its Routes to Ready navigation system into OB/GYN and pediatric practices in Guilford County.
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Develop navigation system to connect families with effective services
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- Program partners have inventoried collateral material needed to roll out a testing phase of Routes to Ready branded information to families this fall.
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Expand and integrate proven programs to meet community need
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- The Medical Home Advisory Team shared best practices from integrations with programs at Carolina Pediatrics, Greensboro Pediatrics, and Cone Family Medicine. Reach Out and Read will also provide more options for books featuring diversity for medical practices.
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Build a culture of continuous quality improvement (CQI)
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- Four organizations from our first cohort have completed five of the six modules in the Model for Improvement learning community. All modules will be completed by the end of October.
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Build technology to support data-informed decisions
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- Shared data sets, including revisions, are outlined in the data-sharing agreements circulated to stakeholders.
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Conduct rigorous evaluation process and build sustainability for system-building work
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- James Bell and Associates (JBA) is moving forward with logic models for the first six components of the evaluation. Once those are complete, they will add the Evidence-Based Program expansion and the Backbone Organization logic models.
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The Basics Guilford
Eleven pediatric practices are distributing Basics Guilford information to families with young children. Several of them are using video books – which have small screens inside a book-like cover that play videos teaching adults how to use the Basics with the children in their lives.
Pathways Center has partnered with Ready Ready to revamp its family playroom to make it more developmentally friendly and welcoming to families with young children. Part of the redecoration included The Basics Guilford decals and posters to inform families about these five simple concepts.
Family Voice
Guilford Parent Leader Network members attended a virtual workshop on Darkness to Light. It’s a training that specializes in the education and prevention of child sexual abuse, other forms of abuse, and mandated reporting. Darkness to Light’s educational model uses 5 Steps to Protecting Children. It outlines core principles for preventing, recognizing, and reacting responsibly to child sexual abuse.
Ages 3-5
Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) has selected community partners to pilot strategies focused on families with children ages 3-5 in Guilford County. Ready Ready has chosen these evidence-based programs and partner agencies for this important work:
Reading Connections will implement the Motheread/Fatheread curriculum with parents and caregivers who are strengthening their own literacy skills. This curriculum creates literacy-rich home environments and encourages shared reading between adults and children.
The United Way of Greater Greensboro will offer Raising a Reader through a collaboration with Guilford County School’s North Carolina Pre-kindergarten classrooms. Lessons from the pilot in the 2022-23 school year will inform the program's expansion countywide to additional early childhood classrooms.
The Kellin Foundation will facilitate the Community Resiliency Model (CRM). This intervention can be used with families and other professionals, such as early childhood educators, to promote awareness of stress triggers and teach skills to manage emotional reactions. There is a specific focus on the impact of trauma when implementing strategies to promote healthy responses to stress.
Family Service of the Piedmont will implement Triple P – Positive Parenting Program – in one of Guilford County’s high-poverty census tracts in High Point. Triple P offers a range of supports for families, ranging from general parenting education to interventions for specific social-emotional challenges children may experience.
The YWCA-High Point will work with Parents as Teachers to enhance parent and caregiver skills around social-emotional development through home visits and group activities. By reaching families in the home, parent educators can provide support and education to families with a specific focus on preparing for kindergarten entry.
To implement the Pre-K to Kindergarten Transition and Alignment strategy, Ready Ready is working with Dr. Cindy Bagwell, Dr. Catherine Scott-Little, and Dr. Stephen Jackson - a team of experts with more than 80 years of experience studying and developing curriculum, leading change, shifting policy, and building public will at the local, state, and regional levels. Their experience with the NC Department of Instruction and the More at Four program will be very influential on their work. They are creating a community-driven process to engage essential stakeholders to build the plan we will implement.
Learn more on our website.
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New York Times: Why you can’t find child care: 100,000 workers are missing
“There are 100,000 fewer child-care workers than there were before the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even as private-sector employment fully rebounded over the summer from the job losses caused by Covid-19, the child care sector shrank and was 9.7 percent smaller last month than it was in February 2020, federal data shows.” Read more at the New York Times.
Education NC: What can North Carolina learn from early childhood trends across the country?
“What are leaders from other states thinking — and doing — about early childhood workforce shortages and low compensation? About child care deserts, particularly for the youngest children? EdNC interviewed early learning experts at the Hunt Institute, a nonprofit that educates state policymakers and governors on education policy issues, to find out.” See the full story at EducationNC.
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