Considering Your Capacity

Considering Your Capacity
The issues impacting young children and their families in the field of early childhood that fuels my passion is adequate training for early care providers and staff. As a former owner/director of a child care program, I have first-hand knowledge of the importance to have a well trained staff to manage the infant and toddler classrooms. This can be improved when parents are more involved with the childcare program by volunteering and taking training classes offered by the program to provide parents with adequate resources and information. This type of parent involvement will be of a tremendous assistance to the teaching staff to build a relationship with the staff.
My special skills that can contribute to the advocacy efforts are that I am an approved trainer and am capable of providing professional development training to teachers in the infant and toddler classrooms. I am very familiar with the infant/toddler Georgia state program that focuses on improving the infant/toddler care in child care programs at home and at the center level. The program is managed by the Department of Early Care and Learning. The GAPITC program is one of six programs under Quality Initiative the focus is “offers training and technical assistance to directors and teachers who serve children birth to 3 years old in centers or family child care homes” (decal.ga.us). This is a voluntary program for any childcare provider that is registered or licensed with the state agency to get assistance from Infant/Toddler Specialists who provide on-site services.
The resources that I have at my disposal that can benefit my advocacy work is my degree in early childhood education is focused on infant/toddler development. I have been a licensed child care provider so I am very familiar with the rules and regulations of my state and what is expected. The state is going through a voluntary Quality Rated System and I believe this will help me get more providers involve with QRS to improve their infant/toddler programs. I have also received training from the state infant/toddler program to ensure that the desired results are achieved by ensuring the “Quality infant/toddler care is centered on relationships. Young children learn and grow in the context of secure, trusting relationships with caring adults” (decal.ga.us). I can pass on what I have learned to administrators and teaching staff about building relationships, preparing and implementing curriculum and daily activities that is appropriate in caring and educating infants and toddlers.

Reference
http://decal.ga.gov/QualityInitiatives/InfantToddlerCare.aspx

Motivations, Strategies, Resources, Leadership, and Advice

“My Role of an Advocate”
My motivation to start advocating for very young children started a few years of being a child care provider. I have many motivations but here is one that inspired me to work with the community leaders to advocate for children. The issue was a Hispanic family in my program and only the dad in the family spoke a little English. The mom came to register her son for Pre-K and she could not read the application forms. My staff and I tried our bet with google translate to assist this parent which was very frustrating and embarrassing for the parent. In one of our pre-K collaboration county, I brought up the subject of translating the forms into Spanish for the Hispanic/Latino families. To my surprise there were many more providers that had the same issues so we wrote letters to the school board. The superintendent was on the board of the agency that issued the forms so he brought our letters of recommendation to the board detailing our concerns for these families. The board denied our request.
This did not stop me, because I hired a bilingual teacher who translated our documents for the families we served and I shared it with other providers. I felt that it was not enough and felt that the problem was just not in child care but also in the school system. So I wrote another letter to the superintendent about how this issue was affecting his school system. Eventually, he accepted my forms to use with the Pre-K families and after a year or so the entire school system. Currently, all forms to enroll a child in a child care facility or school system is now written in English and Spanish. I realized that this advocacy efforts did not just occurred at my program or just in my community but statewide. This shows that advocacy efforts starting at the micro level can propel to the macro level but it needs to start somewhere. It is like throwing a people in a lake that creates a ripple effect.
A community leader is someone that wants the best for the children and families in the area they live in. As stated in the Zero To Three article, “The core of being a community leader is having passion for an issue, and the issue I am most passionate about is early childhood development” (Zerotothree.org). I believe that there definitely need to be something that you realized must change. I believe that the issue must be a passion that is either personal of professional. In advocating for children especially the very young we can face a variety of challenges such as getting people in the community to understand if one child or family is affected and nothing is done there could be more in the community and around the state and so on. I feel that it the community is educated about the issues and how it will improve the lives of the children in the community they will be more eager to participate. One way of educating people in the community is to pass out information via email, letters, posters etc., “highlighting the advocacy events, strategies and proposing opportunities for action on the issues” (Zerotothree.org). From my experience on advocating on a particular issue I believe that one of the biggest challenges is getting people motivated once they know what the issues is all about. It is like working with them to buy into the idea for advocating for the changes.

My advice to anyone that is interested in taking on a leadership role to advocate for young children and their families is to start building a good relationship with other leaders in the community that have a vested interest in early childhood education. As stated in the article, “By establishing open lines of communication between you and your advocacy partners, your advocacy work will be much stronger” (ZeroToThree.org). There are leaders in the community that want to become advocates for early childhood education but are intimidated by others or the fear of losing their status in the community. I believe that if you are passionate about what is important for young children and their families you can become a great leader and advocate but you must “ really focus on bringing all those stakeholders together to support the face-to-face work with children and families”(ZeroToThree.org).

Reference
Article: Zero to Three Policy Center. (2008). Advocacy strategies to improve outcomes for very
young children: Interviews with leaders at the state and community levels. Retrieved
from http://main.zerotothree.org/site/DocServer/AdvocacyLeaders_final.pdf?docID=1882

Personal Advocacy Reflection by Emily

Messages for Families

Personal Advocacy Reflection by Emily
My personal reflection is related to a family that I advocated for and have impacted their lives. The family will remain nameless for privacy reasons.
A family came and enrolled their child who was about 6 months old and this child did great in our care as the child grew and develop into a wonderful little girl. The childcare program I operated always utilized observations and assessments and share this information with the parents. We always ask the parents’ permission to share this information with a few therapists that often visit the program if we observe any developmental delays with the children.
This family then had an addition to the family a beautiful baby boy who was also enrolled into the program at the age of 6 months. After a few weeks, my infant/ toddler room teacher did a few assessments on the child and realized that he was not developing at the appropriate milestones. The program utilized ITERS – (Infant Toddlers Early Rating Scale). The teacher brought this to my attention so I suggested that we have a conference with the parents. We did the conference and the parents refuse to have the child evaluated because she stated that we were wrong about her son. This went on for several months. We then observed that the child was not walking and other developmental issues began to emerge. During this time frame the parents were going through some family situations that were violent and led to a divorce. The children were withdrawn from the program and still were not receiving any services. I begged and pleaded with the mother to let me help her get the appropriate help for the child.
After three month, the mother called me and asked if she could re-enroll the children, the girl was now 4 years old and the boy about 18 months. I pleaded with my staff to staff observations ASAP; the girl was on track and doing great as she entered the Pre-K program. The boy was not working, talking or socializing with the other children. We also noticed that the deformity we observed at 6 months old was more evident; he had a (congenital deformity) club foot.
The mom was in such a bad place emotionally because of the divorce and ignored every opportunity to sit down and conference with me and the child’s teacher. Eventually, I told the mom, I know you are having a hard time because of personal problems but this child needs help now. The reality of this situation was the mom also had a deformed foot and felt that her son would be fine because she was. I had a heart to heart conversation with this parent and tell her that he son’s deformity in not just his foot but he also had cognitive, social and physical delays that must be addressed right now. I told her I will do everything in my power to help her even if I have to take him to be evaluated myself. I said this to her because she was now a single mom and did not want to lose her job so I volunteered to help this child. She still refused to seek help so I called ‘Babies, Can’t wait’ who sent child development therapist out to do the initial observation. The therapist thanked me for making the call and suggested that I give the mom and the pediatrician a copy of the results. At the end of the day when the parent showed up to pick the children up I asked to have a private conversation with her as I showed her the results from Babies Can’t Wait and explained to her what will happen next and my offer to help as much as I could. She broke down and cried because she said she was in denial and never imagined that her child would be a special need child and that I would take the time and effort to help her son. I told her that I felt compelled to help because I knew that this child would slip through crack and end up being further behind developmentally if nothing was done soon. I believed in early intervention for this child and ensured he received.
Babies Can’t Wait was very supportive and came to the center three times a week to provide, speech, occupational and physical therapy for this child. He was also provided with a walker to assist him with walking so that he could explore and enjoy the learning environment. This child is now 4 years old, talks, socializes and walk without a walker and is getting ready for Pre-K in August. I am so glad that I advocated for him. Although, my child care center is closed and has been for over a year this parent makes an effort to communicate her son’s progress and thanks me continuously. On another note, the mom was also able to get some therapy for her own deformity. I receive a card from this family and there was a note that stated.
“Thank you Ms. Emily for going above and beyond to get my son the help he needed because I could not see any flaws in him. You have also helped me to realized that I could also get help for my deformity. I also want to say that what you have done for me and my son as a black person, my parents didn’t do for me as a child. They believed that I was “Retarded” so when my son was born, I was told that I was being punished. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, I will always remember you. My children thank you especially the redheaded one”.

Tools for Policy Makers and Advocate

I am hoping to learn about all the tools I will need to become a very effective advocate for children and families. As stated in resources I read in this week there were a few definitions about advocacy and this one stood out to me. “Advocacy consists of different strategies aimed at influencing decision-making at the organizational, local, provincial, national and international levels”(Kieff, J. (2009).