Research indicates that a high-quality education in the first few years of school can increase children's success in reading, writing, and math; close achievement gaps; and set the foundation for healthy and engaged citizenship. This critical early-learning period has been affected, like everything else, by a global pandemic. Quentin Brown, the executive director of Educare Lincoln in Nebraska, had to adapt an early-childhood model that prioritizes using data, parent and caregiver engagement, and wraparound services for children ages 0-5 whose families come from challenging situations. He spoke with ASCD earlier this fall how about how 2020 has affected education in the early years and what lessons he's learned so far.
What drew you to the work of early childhood learning?
I've spent most of my nonprofit career working in youth service. The global data on early childhood education and the importance of brain development from ages 0-5 is highly impressive. We can't ignore the work that happens at this age because without it, we're in trouble. Without quality early ed, we're in trouble.
How has Educare Lincoln adapted in light of the coronavirus?
In no way do we even remotely understand what an entire school district may be going through during this time. But over the past months, we have gone through several evolutions that have created many learning opportunities for us (and potentially for standalone facilities that operate similar to how we operate). In March, when we made the difficult decision to close our doors, families needed us to reopen. While we could not operate within our building for a period, we never ceased operations. We took a few weeks to design a virtual operations plan that allowed our educators and family engagement specialists to maintain contact with our families.
When we reopened in July, the new challenge was transitioning to back a familiar environment in a way that conveyed new and updated health and safety measures. To do so, we heavily relied on our health services coordinator and school director to guide a COVID-19 operations plan under COVID-19—procedures for washing hands constantly, wearing masks, keeping nonessential people out, taking temperatures, changing the building entry process, distancing our teachers, ensuring that if a case comes into the building we can quickly and easily contact trace, and ensuring that we limit contact to small groups of people.
We first reopened to students of working families because we recognized that having more people in the building would increase our risk and we needed to prioritize serving families with the greatest needs. This slow rollout gave us with a month to work with a smaller population and to make adjustments, ultimately allowing us to test our plan in a responsible way. As for our case count to date, we have only had a handful of cases, all of which were caught early with minimal exposure risk, allowing us to maintain at least 80 percent of our operations at any time.
What do you think are the biggest issues facing early childhood classrooms, especially during the pandemic?
The biggest issues are adapting our social-emotional aspects to meet the changing environment and providing consistent engagement at a time when a building closure or a child/teacher absence could happen any day for an extended period of time. To combat this, teachers have remained up to date on professional development opportunities focused specifically on social-emotional learning. Additionally, we ensured that teachers were informed of all of the tools at their disposal and how to use them for remote learning: Zoom, email, phone, and distanced visits through our family engagement team.
Early childhood also provides many services and supports that often go unnoticed—diapers and wipes, supplies, activities. This year, we have coordinated with local suppliers to provide those materials and use a combination of both dropping off supplies to parents and having them pick up supplies at the school. We had a parent parade where parents parked their cars and we gave out supplies. Our city and local food bank and school district provided meals to families on a regular basis out of our parking lot and we made sure our parents knew when that service was available. Our food services person created nutritional activities and classroom teachers created arts and social-emotional activities. We ramped up our use of social media. It was an opportunity to position ourselves to come back stronger than when we left.
What should leaders and classroom teachers think about when planning distance or hybrid learning for young learners and their families?
Connecting with families in this "virtual" way hasn't really changed how we support them. Our engagement with parents, for the most part, has always been remote. Besides the occasional visit at our school, a lot of the work with our parents was, and continues to be, done through virtual means. Connecting families to job readiness or basic needs services are even more important during this time. We have to expect that those at home who are not working – laid off, furloughed—will somewhere down the line have financial need and we should supporting them in job searches, education, and providing various community resources.
As for considerations that need to be made for planning remote learning for this age group, it is critically important to recognize that young learners are not built to take on remote learning like some older children might be. We have to be mindful of how much online time is actually needed and how much is reasonable or even possible. We work around this by identifying activities that students can do with family members, whether online or offline with basic materials and supplies in the home. This is not innovative by any means, but it is an effort that did not come easily for an organization that had to make this change overnight, like so many others.
Research shows that early childhood education lays the foundation for wellbeing in the years ahead. What components does the Educare model use to support young students?
We stand firm on our "four Ps" to prepare our children for kindergarten: a high-quality program, partner engagement, a compelling platform, and functional places and spaces. We intentionally hire people who have demonstrated through formal education or work experience how much they care about early ed. The Educare model is cost-free and has three teachers per classroom, a health services and food coordinator, family engagement specialists, master teachers, and coaches. Anyone can apply, but we prioritize serving families that have the highest needs.
What safety measures have you put in place for teachers and students?
We're providing protective equipment for teachers and students, like face masks, face shields, aprons, gloves, and filters, and trainings with our health services coordinator (cleaning vs. sanitizing, using the isolation room, how to ensure we aren't cross contaminating, etc.),. We also enforce safety measures in the environment. We call out people who aren't wearing masks and hold each other accountable. When we do coordinate activities—naptime, meals, etc.—we make sure children are at a distance. The challenge is that it's hard to keep 3- and 5-year-olds apart. We also ensure that our classrooms stay together as one unit so that if/when we find a case of COVID-19, we can easily trace and minimize exposure to other classrooms.
Anything else to add?
I recommend going back with a plan. I've seen a couple instances where teams have reopened without a written plan in place and things could have turned out better for them. Take the time to create a well-informed plan using the data and best information that you have at the moment, get feedback from teachers and others that are going to have to fulfill that plan, incorporate that feedback, and go forth.
